On Sun, Sep 02, 2012 at 10:43:07AM +0100, Sam Jones wrote:
> More to satisfy my own curiosity than anything else, I'm wondering about
> the performance that could be squeezed out of Postfix in a bulk mailing
> capacity.
Running a high volume bulk email platform is not a software problem.
It is a logistics problem. Enrolling on the whitelists and feedback
loops of various large email providers, handling bounce-backs,
jumping through rate-limit hoops, ...
> I have a client that currently uses and ESP who have an astounding
> throughput of up to a million messages per hour.
This is not astounding, a single ~2003 Dell 1850 Postfix server
was measured by me at ~300 msgs/sec of deliveries to real users
with nothing but a simple MegaRAID controller (with battery cache)
striping two SCSI disks. This would go another factor of 2 faster
on today's commodity servers, but the real issue is finding peers
who'll accept your mail at that rate.
> discussion about high-performance MTAs and tuning and the general
> comments I'm hearing are that things like Postfix, Exim, Sendmail &
> are just not man enough for such a task and the absolute best you could
> expect from any of them is about 100k messages per hour.
Many bulk email services in fact use Postfix, Exim, ... The MTA
software is often not the bottleneck. They split bulk deliveries
over many machines (or lots of IPs on the same machine) and tune
to avoid throttling by the ESP over and above all other concerns.
Raw MTA performance is rarely a factor.
> Now, I like to wipe out the fact from fiction because people like
> PowerMTA are looking to sell their products and it would be in their
> interest to neglect that any MTA (Postfix/Exim/Sendmail) could be set up
> in a way that would easily rival their product.
Bulk email is a logistics exercise. When you choose an bulk email
delivery service, you're buying their logistics skills and their
reputation with mailbox providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, ...)
> Can anyone on the list tell me if it's possible to performance tune
> Postfix to a point where it could complete with this and possible
> strategies?
Wrong question.
--
Viktor.
