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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.Hawaii.Edu!news.uoregon.edu!hunter.premier.net!news.nl.innet.net!INnl.net!feed1.news.erols.com!cpk-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.mathworks.com!enews.sgi.com!news.sgi.com!news1.best.com!nntp1.best.com!usenet From: dillon@flea.best.net (Matt Dillon) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.smail,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Sendmail vs. Smail... Date: 9 Dec 1996 21:56:31 GMT Organization: BEST Internet Communications, Inc. Lines: 35 Distribution: inet Message-ID: <58i1uf$9ah@nntp1.best.com> References: <57tf61$gq7@raven.eva.net> <589s2i$aro@raven.eva.net> <58ffd7$op8@pacer.nlc.net.au> <58h6r1$8ik@ezekiel.eunet.ie> NNTP-Posting-Host: flea.best.net Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.mail.sendmail:34967 comp.mail.smail:2669 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:32306 :In article <58h6r1$8ik@ezekiel.eunet.ie>, Nick Hilliard <nick@eunet.ie> wrote: :>John Saunders (john@pacer.nlc.net.au) said: :>: qmail sends each recipient their own message rather than using a single :>: message for both. The Qmail author says that in practice this scenario is :>: very rare, also for a link with lots of BW and a slow round trip time it's :>: faster to send 2 messages at the same time than 1 message with an extra :>: receipient. :> :>Very rare? Two extra complete SMTP negotiations and transmissions faster :>than a single RCPT? :> :>How interesting. :> :>Nick Not only that, but if you send the messages separately, you are using N times the disk space for the N separate messages as well as potentially blowing sendmail connection caching into little pieces, plus the N-times additional cpu and memory resources required (depending on the queueing mode of the message). Do a large mailing list this way and your mail machine is well on its way to becoming a hunk of dead meat. Perhaps what John is refering to is the parallelism you get by sending the messages separately. I.E. if you send one message to ten people verses ten messages each to a single person, the one message may stall on some of the email addresses due to connection delays, DNS timeouts, etc etc etc.... causing other messages to be delayed more. The ten messages, on the otherhand, run in parallel. I don't think it's worth it. You just eat up too much of your machine's resources if you ever try to scale it up, and you tend to create cascade failures when you get spammed or someone uses you for a relay. -Matt