The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Liam Kirsher <address@concealed>]

Maybe this was a bit vague, but I would like to know a bit more about
how Sympa handles large lists!

## Maximum number of recipients per call to Sendmail
nrcpt   25
## Max. number of different domains per call to Sendmail
avg     10
## Max. number of Sendmail processes (launched by Sympa) running
simultaneously
## Proposed value is quite low, you can rise it up to 100, 200 or even
300 with powerfull systems.
maxsmtp 100

What kind of throughput should I expect with that hardware and those
settings?  Is there some documentation on tweaking these values for best
performance?

Also, how exactly does Sympa deal with that many messages?  If, for some
reason, it were interrupted would it be able to continue where it left off?

Thanks in advance for shedding some light on this for me!

Liam

Liam Kirsher wrote:
> Hi --
>
> I wasn't able to find any performance statistics, so maybe someone can
> give me a general idea...
>
> I'm running Sympa 5.3.b4 on an older RedHat 8.0 system.  A small number
> of relatively small (<2000 subscriber) lists.  The server has two 650MHz
> CPU's and 899M memory.  (I have a new server I'm installing which is
> more robust, but that won't happen for another month.)
>
> Currently, the server is not very busy.  I have a celebrity client with
> a mailing list of about 80,000 addresses. 
>
> Will that server be able to handle a list of 80,000 addresses?
>
> I'm a little unclear on how the emails are delivered to the MTA.  They
> are batched, so that the MTA (postfix, in this case) doesn't try to
> deliver them all at once, right?
>
> I'm also running dkim, which requires some resources, as well.  (And on
> the receiving end, Amavisd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV.)
>
>
> Another question -- what are commercial services that provide this kind
> of service?  I want to charge a fair market price for running this for them.
>
> Best,
> Liam
>
>
>   

-- 
Liam Kirsher
PGP: http://liam.numenet.com/pgp/