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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!news.ececs.uc.edu!news.kei.com!news.texas.net!www.nntp.primenet.com!nntp.primenet.com!newspump.sol.net!ddsw1!news.mcs.net!not-for-mail From: les@MCS.COM (Leslie Mikesell) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.smail,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Sendmail vs. Smail... Date: 15 Dec 1996 22:45:21 -0600 Organization: /usr/lib/news/organi[sz]ation Lines: 48 Message-ID: <592k51$4g0@Venus.mcs.net> References: <57tf61$gq7@raven.eva.net> <1996Dec1005.15.53.2968@koobera.math.uic.edu> <58mchc$d6o@ezekiel.eunet.ie> <1996Dec1121.15.26.13717@koobera.math.uic.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: venus.mcs.com Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.mail.sendmail:35235 comp.mail.smail:2722 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:32676 In article <1996Dec1121.15.26.13717@koobera.math.uic.edu>, D. J. Bernstein <djb@koobera.math.uic.edu> wrote: >> ... at the expense of running 10 extra delivery daemons on your local system >> and using 10x traffic. > >What percentage of your mail volume consists of messages with 10 >recipients on the same system? Mine is probably >50% - mostly departmental memo type messages. >> this is a mighty inefficient use of resources. > >Profile. Don't speculate. Measurements at three sites showed that qmail >generates less traffic than sendmail. (The biggest savings in each case >came from DNS lookups.) I'm confused by this. Aren't you running at least a caching nameserver on the same machine as sendmail? If so, what is sendmail doing that generates more traffic? Obviously qmail has to resolve the same addresses, so aren't the extra steps done by sendmail always going to be resolved from the cache? >> CAPITAL LETTERS or not, if an ISP or end-user system cannot handle 10 RCPT's >> on one SMTP connection, that's their problem and it's their job to fix it. > >Sorry, they don't have the money to buy the extra network capacity. The >fact remains that you've failed to get the mail through. I'm quite sure my machines would be unhappy with simultaneous processes trying to deliver everything at once on the destination side. In fact before the last upgrade I batched everything through uucp just to avoid that effect. (Part of the problem was a LAN notification process that ran as a side effect of delivery, but the uucp batching also correctly handles the sites that are long distance phone calls away and the one that is on a 56K line and gets lots of group messages). >> Additionally in this case, if the problem with this site is line overload, >> sending 10 copies of the email is just making this user's line overload >> problem even worse than it already is. > >Nonsense. The repeated connections, failing every time, used _thousands_ >of packets---vastly more than qmail. OK, a variation of your question above applies here. What percentage of your mail goes to sites that can't handle ten RCPT's on a message? Les Mikesell les@mcs.com