RE: metrics for objective postfix vs. sendmail
Hi,
thanks to all who replied. i was going to summarize, but, then i
realized i'm not an authority and should leave that to others, like
Victor Duchovni.
anyhoo, i'm gonna call this one done. i'm committed to switching
to postfix. (i already was.) Duchovni lists several excellent points,
but everyone lists the "reading comprehension" factor.
in my case, i didn't list any sort of data mostly because i don't
have it. every time i've gone looking for data i come back with
the same results:
(at my site) spam arrives in big slugs. when a big
slug arrives sendmail will bog down--what wouldn't? and the
process monitoring software will complain that sendmail is down
when it isn't. otherwise, the machine is lightly loaded. it
doesn't need any more firepower. (actually, we have two external
and two internal, but the same remarks apply to all the machines.)
so getting lots of performance data and doing lots of tuning will
result in tuning the idle loop. and nothing worthwhile will happen.
furthermore, the load on each of the four is different,
and no two of those four have equivalent hardware.
per Duchovni, postfix should be better at handling
connection requests under load, and that should silence the false
alarms. we shall see -- they were intermittant to start so it'll
take a while to know for sure.
again, thanks to all who replied. FWIW i was drawn to postfix because
it seemed to me that, after all those years, the MTA was due for a
bottom-up rewrite. well, that's just my $0.02.
thanks.
j.
--
Jay Scott 512-835-3553 g...@arlut.utexas.edu
Head of Sun Support, Sr. System Administrator
Applied Research Labs, Computer Science Div. S224
University of Texas at Austin
