Re: [exim] Limits on address expansion

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Author: Marc Haber
Date:  
To: exim-users
Subject: Re: [exim] Limits on address expansion
On Thu, 15 Feb 2007 12:18:12 +0000 (GMT), Philip Hazel
<ph10@???> wrote:
>On Thu, 15 Feb 2007, Marc Haber wrote:
>> The system in question is running with queue_only = true to take
>> advantage of the two-stage queue running process invoked by exim -qq.
>
>That is an unusual configuration, for which the default settings were
>not designed. Not only is remote_max_parallel relevant, but
>same_domain_copy_routing is probably wanted here. You would find that if
>you grepped the spec for "mailing list".


same_domain_copy_routing is set by default in Debian systems, which
was incidentally used on the system at hand.

I actually grepped the spec for mailng list and did not find any
mention of remote_max_parallel in a one hundred line vicinity of
"mailing list".

>> The current case, where an alias is used to expand a single address
>> into a list of 20K recipients, is a "first" for me and I was
>> dumbfounded by exim not having delivered to the first thousand
>> recipients after an hour.
>
>You are lucky it works at all - not Exim, which should manage 20K
>recipients - but if you try to send a single copy somewhere with more
>than a few hundred recipients, it may get rejected.


I am aware of that. However, the method of address list delivery was
forced upon the local admin, and he didn't have the time to find a
light-weight software which would do the splitting in a sensible
manner. Anybody can recommend one?

>More than 100 recipients in the same domain is therefore risky.


I know that. The end customer didn't seem to care.

>Another
>point is that, with 20K recipients, Exim will use a lot of main memory
>(but that may not be an issue in these days of multi-gigabyte memories).


That's a non-issue.

>> Unfortunately, the system owner decided to replace exim with postfix
>> before I found out about remote_max_parallel. Postfix delivers to all
>> 20K recipients in like five minutes.
>
>So Postfix is clearly optimized well by default for this application.


Yes. Without having looked at postfix any closer, I suspect that
postfix does not use a per-message lock as exim does.

Greetings
Marc

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