I know this question has been asked before, in sometimes quite violent
threads, but I'll ask again anyway. We are looking to send high volume
bulk emails to customers. The emails will be personalized to each user.
Basically we're sending them out specific investment information which
they ask for. That means every email is different, which limits out
options. There are close to a million email addresses we have to send to
each day and we'd like to be sending at a rate of 30+ emails per second
so that we can finish in a reasonable amount of time. Currently, based
on poor decisions in the past, NT is being used with Microsoft
SMTP Server. The mailer writes directly to the SMTP pickup directory
which will grab the file, try and send it, and queue it if it failts.
Message delivery is not exceeding 5 emails per second. Because of this
we've been considering other options. Currently the machines are 4 proc
xeons with 512mb ram and a single scsi drive. Obviously this machine is
not very appropriate for the task its being given... poor drive access,
too much ram, etc. However, 4 have already been purchased for this... My
question then is, in your honest, semi-unbiased opinions, do you think
we would see *significant* results by switching to a qmail
environment? Also, should this be so, which operating system should we
be running qmail under? Which is the most "qmail friendly" in an intel
environment? Linux or FreeBSD are the preferred solutions, but again, we
are looking for the best overall performance results.
On another note, to eliminate any possible confusion:
- bandwidth is not an issue--the line is very under-utilized
- we believe a key bottleneck is the limit on the maximum number of
sockets that NT places. A connection to a sql server has to be made to
generate each message, doubling the overhead
- the server is also very under-utilized... ram usage never exceeds
160mb or so (surprise) and processor usage never exceeds 20% per
processor or so (another shocker...).
Please don't take the time to remark on whether the server was a bad or
worse choice. Anyone who has ever worked for a large company should
understand that you get what you're given--the people who buy the
hardware rarely have any ties to the people who have to use it.
I appreciate your input...
Cris Daniluk
