Cyrus + (insert Best MTA here) Suggestions

[Ow Mun Heng]

On Thu, 2004-11-18 at 16:31, lst_hoe01 at kwsoft.de wrote:
> Zitat von Ow Mun Heng <Ow.Mun.Heng at wdc.com>:
> 
> > Hi all,
> >
> > 	I'm curious on why I'm seeing more references to postfix (both here and
> > on googling) when setting up an email server (scalable/high
> > performance/etc).
> >
> > Michael Nguyen actually states that
> > "Postfix + LDAP just was plain faster under stress than Qmail + LDAP and
> > Sendmail + LDAP"
> >
> > I've read in another google find that postfix is at least 3x faster than
> > sendmail.
> >
> > I'm just wondering why that is.
> 
> General note on this : Dependant on the special configuration you are testing
> anyone of the MTAs can be the fastest. What seams to be the common baseline :
> - Postfix is designed to avoid sync writes as much as possible, so if your I/O
> system is the bottleneck (as most of the time is) Postfix should be the
> fastest.

IO is always an issue. Esp when the target is either a 7200/10K rpm SATA
drive.

> - Qmail has some drawback by the "one message per recipient" design if your
> bandwidth is limited and you relay many multi-recipient mails.

Then this is a definate 'won't bother to look' criteria for me already.
This, by design, (and I've not read much about it) is already something
which I feel is stupid.

> - A careful sendmail/milter setup with a strong machine can be faster then
> Qmail/Postfix with traditional store/forward content filter.

I'm running sendmail 8.13+clamav-milter+spamass-milter and during the
mornings when I fetchmail from my sever, to be fed to my local MTA, The
load is quite high. Most likely due to the milters.

I don't get the store/forward content filter meaning.


> - Qmail and Postfix are considered more secure than Sendmail.
Ditto. but being considered does not necessary mean it is.

> - Postfix and Sendmail are more flexibel in adjusting to your sepcial setup.
I like sendmail maybe because I know of it's Features. 

I esp like sendmail after I found the "FALLBACK_MX" feature. (sendmail
will try to lookup and send direct via recipient MX 1st, if it fails,
then it goes to the fallback_mx which is most likely the ISP relay)

Does postfix support this?


> 
> Your setup (speed of DNS, lookup maps etc.) have more influence than the
> difference beetween the MTAs.
> 
> >
> > Can anyone shed some light?
> 
> To find the definitive answer for your setup you have to test yourself.

Unfortunately, I don't have too many machines which I can play with.

I currently have
1. Laptop (1.4G centrino/512MB ram)
2. P166 MMX laptop (72M ram)
3. P133 Desktop (128MB Ram)

> 
> >
> > Also, I've heard that sendmail does not support maildir format natively,
> > but I've also heard that one can use procmail to deliver it into maildir
> > format.
> 
> No Sendmail guru here, but if you use procmail you have lost on the performance
> comparsion ;-)

Fedora/redhat by default uses procmail as it's default lmtp.

what do you use then? Is Cyrus considered a LMTP or..?


-- 
Ow Mun Heng
Gentoo/Linux on D600 1.4Ghz 
CPU kernel 2.6.9-gentoo-r1 
Neuromancer 17:20:41 up 5:23, 7 users, load average: 0.52, 0.69, 0.53 

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