On Mon, 2005-10-24 at 10:26, Chris Mauritz wrote:
> Craig White wrote:
>
> >>And it works well. I've been using postfix since 1998-ish and haven't
> >>even considered going back to sendwhale since. Postfix is faster (by a
> >>rather wide margin) and much easier to maintain. And now I don't have
> >>to speak in tongues (M4) to edit my config files. 8-)
> >>
> >>
> >----
> >Really? Did you have some empirical evidence for this performance
> >difference or was this a subjective conclusion by someone what
> >apparently never got the m4 macro concept down?
> >
> >
>
> Yes, I did head to head comparisons about 5 years go on the same
> hardware. Postfix was the fastest, qmail was next, and sendmail was
> slowest. I believe I've also seen similar benchmarks posted on the
> net. I had to do independent testing to satisfy a skeptical consulting
> cilent.
Sendmail is infinitely configurable. Did you check with any large
site administrators about a configuration appropriate for your
benchmarks? The only problem I've ever heard of regarding capacity
is that you may need to set up multiple outbound queues. If there
is any difference in the network side of MTA's it has to be trivial.
The only real work is local delivery (which sendmail doen't do anyway)
and scanning the queue. If scanning the queue becomes a bottleneck
you need multiple queues.
> >I think that if your notions of sendmail and postfix were widely held,
> >that few would use sendmail any longer.
> >
> I think most people that still use sendmail do so because it's been a
> defacto standard for so many years and they're not interested in
> learning a new playbook for another program (kinda like why I still use
> Emacs...wink)...not because it has any speed or security advantage.
Another way to say that is that sendmail does the job perfectly well.
The one thing that you can't duplicate in postfix is the milter
interface for things like MimeDefang to let other programs
make decisions about disposition in real time during the SMTP
conversation. MimeDefang is hard to beat to control virus and
spam scanning and any local customization of mail handling.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com