Re: [exim] Which hardware do you use for your installation?

Quoting Frank S. Bernhardt (frank@???):

>> Exim for the intelligent stuff, Postfix for the brute force deliveries :)
> Why is this a problem for EXIM (someone mentioned db4)?

I have good reasons to believe Exim isn't good at handling large queues
due to the way the spool directory is managed. A quick guess would be
that the db4 file, used for storing retry and wait data, might get big
and lumpy with loads of messages in the queue and loads of hosts to
deliver to.

Though i don't have hard proof for this theory, nor did i check wether
it is possible to choose some other database backend; after we moved the
spool to /dev/shm (in memory) our platform, Exim was much faster and
could handle more messages.

Postfix otoh has a well structured spool directory. I think Postfix
keeps state in memory. It has a much bigger memoryfootprint with it's
'split functions' design...

> Can/should this be fixed?

Maybe. It has to be investigated more thoroughly first, i think.
Such a change probably affects large parts of Exim's code.

> It seems silly and time consuming to have to run/support two mta's.

Well, all it does is accept, queue and deliver. Nothing special, as
long as we keep the box up to date we don't have to 'run/support'
anything about it. ;-)

HTH
-Sndr.
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