sendmail Performance Tuning

1.5. Tuning Isn’t Always Necessary

While this book focuses on email tuning, a large percentage of email systems on the Internet today simply don’t deal with enough traffic to justify buying expensive hardware and spending a great deal of time tuning applications to handle their load. This statement doesn’t mean that email performance tuning won’t offer any benefit for these systems, but merely that extreme measures aren’t justified. This section aims to identify the thresholds at which the most naive email server implementation is likely—although not guaranteed—to work just fine. Typically, storage I/O speeds limit email server performance, as we shall see. In the scenarios that follow, however, we assume that each server in question has a sufficiently ...