Re: [exim] Bulk Outbound Performance

On Sun, 02 Sep 2012 10:40:12 +0100, Ron White wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> More to satisfy my own curiosity than anything else, I'm wondering
> about
> the performance that could be squeezed out of Exim in a bulk mailing
> capacity.
>
> I have a client that currently uses and ESP who have an astounding
> throughput of up to a million messages per hour. This brought up a
> discussion about high-performance MTAs and tuning and the general
> comments I'm hearing are that things like Exim, Sendmail & Postfix
> are
> just not man enough for such a task and the absolute best you could
> expect from any of them is about 100k messages per hour.
>
> Now, I like to wipe out the fact from fiction because people like
> PowerMTA are looking to sell their products and it would be in their
> interest to neglect that any MTA (Exim/Sendmail/Postfix) could be set
> up
> in a way that would easily rival their product.
>
> Can anyone on the list tell me if it's possible to performance tune
> Exim
> to a point where it could complete with this and possible strategies?
>
> Kind thanks
> Ron

Hi,

The bottleneck is usually the remote party which will ban your address
temporarly if you send huge amount of mails from one address. At that
number of messages even network latency and bandwidth will come into the
picture. It's also a question that what's the target message (full size)
that should be delivered? My last question is that what 'thruoghput'
means? Does it mean completed deliveries or that they simply accepted
the mail and they're sitting in the queue?

So I think it's not a matter of MTA fine tuning, but a complete tuning
of the OS (and hardware) that runs the MTA and the MTA itself of course.
For example putting the mailq onto an SSD or into memory might give
quite a boost to any MTA. :)

Regards,
Andras