tuning

[Mike Bilow]

Tuning Sendmail is extremely complicated.  This is because it depends
entirely upon the job you call upon it to do.  If you are running a lot of
mailing lists, for example, then you need to tune it completely
differently than if you deliver mail to a lot of individual mailboxes.  
Sendmail has different settings for interaction with queuing algorithms,
load averages, anti-spam filtering, spawned delivery agents, and so on.

I cannot imagine what kind of network bandwidth you are plugged into if
you are worried about Sendmail being slow on a Dell Poweredge 2300.  We
ran a fairly large mailing list (for the Berlin Project) a few years ago,
which had a volume of about 10,000 mail transactions per day, on a 33 MHz
486 with 16 MB RAM connected via a T1 line.  Admittedly, that required
some careful tuning, but no one noticed or complained.

When you say Sendmail is "slow," exactly what do you mean?

As for telling if your network card is running at 100 Mbps, this is driver
dependent.  Either ifconfig or something in /proc may tell you.

-- Mike


On 2000-05-24 at 23:52 -0400, Frank Ramsay wrote:

> A little background.  The Poweredge 2300 I just set up is going to be for
> experimenting.  Now we ran some tests with sendmail and were _really_
> disapointed.  Sendmail on this is running very slow.  So I'm looking for tuning
> information in two areas:
> 
> 1: sendmail
> 2: Kernel, specificly network.  
> 
> So does anyone know of any good books or web sites that cover this?
> 
> btw, how can I tell that the 100Mbs networkcard is actually running at 100Mbs?


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