Sendmail performance - high volume incoming mail.
 

Running RH7

I have dedicated a mail server to receive all replies and undeliverable mail from several of my clients who run newsletters with thousands of email addresses. Trouble is when all of my clients run their newsletters at the same time, sendmail has trouble handling all of the responses and undeliverable mail.

I am going to split the domains to more servers but at the moment I need to fine-tune the server I have.

Tweaking Sendmail
I have created cron jobs that run shell scripts to keep user mailboxes cleaned up but my main problem is mqueue getting clogged.
I have created 99 que directories in the mqueue dir and told sendmail to use them all. I run the que every 5 minutes but the que’s can’t run fast enough. The multiple que’s defiantly help with speed.

Am I running the que to soon? Am I running too many que dir’s or not enough?

Is there anything else I can do to tweak Sendmail to handle such large volumes of incoming mail?

Thanks.

I run sendmail on this machine with 5 queues and it has no problem at all with the LinuxQuestions.org Community Bulletin, which currently has 11,455 subscribers. sendmail is quite a complex program though. Can you put your sendmail.cf up on the web somewhere and post a link (please don't copy and paste the whole file here). More info about the machine in question would also be helpful (ie. processor speed, number of disks, speed of disks, does the queue have its own disk, etc).

--jeremy

More about the server:
- Dual 500 P3
- 256mg RAM
- Scsi HD
- Que is not on separate disk.
- Bandwidth T-1

Thanks.