Developers of Sympa

[Fil <address@concealed>]

> A alternative is to use postfix. The tunning is very defferent from sendmail
> solution because Postfix when called using the sendmail compatible binary
> do not try a smtp session to deliver the message. It just put in the spool
> the message. In this case Sympa need only a few minutes for 140 000 
> messages,
> but postfix will need a lot of time in order to distribute all thoses
> messages. 
> I'am not a postfix expert and I can't help for it's tunning but the first 
> think
> to do is to increase a lot NRCPT and AVG. (Fil could you give us some 
> detail ?)
> Postfix is much more faster than sendmail but the communication
> with sympa should be smtp session, not lunching commands. 

My list is ~131 000 subscribers, and messages around 10k. My computer is
connected via a 2mbps line. I use sympa+postfix, and had to tweak settings a
lot to have something functioning. Here's the gist of what I do :

In /etc/sympa.conf:

nrcpt           600
avg             600
maxsmtp         2
sendmail        /usr/sbin/sendmail-sleep


/usr/sbin/sendmail-sleep is just a 2-lines wrapper script:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/sendmail $*
sleep 140


Why? sympa gives all the addresses to sendmail, as fast as possible. But
postfix's 'sendmail' is not a very powerful program, it's just a 'drop-in'
that puts the mail into postfix's queue, and not very efficiently (it dumps
everything into postfix's drop directory).

So we just drop a pack of 600 addresses (one file containing the message+600
recipients), wait 140 seconds, drop another pack, and so on. And this
happens in 3 parallel lines (maxsmtp+1, I don't know why there's one more).
I guess you would get about the same performance with maxsmtp=30 and
sleep 1400.

Then evaluate the load, the speed of your system, guess if it's too slow or
too loaded, and tweak the sleep time (you can rather safely edit it inside
/usr/sbin/sendmail-sleep while sympa is running, which is nice if the thing
is too slow ;) -- just be careful not to create script errors, just edit the
sleep time!!