Re: [exim] Bulk Outbound Performance

On Sun, 2012-09-02 at 14:43 +0200, Gót András wrote:
> 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

Thanks for the follow up Andras.

Agree that it's not just the MTA, there is lots more going on.

What I'm looking to do - taking out the other factors like network
speed, recipient rejection etc - is to establish if Exim can compete
with the so-called wonder MTA's like PowerMTA.

Exim is my preferred MTA and I love it, I'd just like to be able to
stick a couple of fingers up at the doubters and say 'yes, it can
compete with that.'