Sendmail performance on Windows NT?, WNT/Sendmail performance problems

[natasha]

I'm running Xmail 1.06 under NT. The issue I am having is REALLY SLOW performance on any CGI that attempts to use Sendmail.exe. The CGI applications all use the PERLISAPI filter so it isn't the spawning of the perl process taking the time. It's only CGI's that send out a mail message that seem to bog down.
In particular, I am using DISCUS 3.10.3 PRO, which says that it supports NET::Sendmail or MAIL::Sendmail. It DOES send mail messages in the background but it takes *ages* to send them, and in the process slows down the whole posting process to the point that sometimes it doesn't return the proper info to the client browser.
Does anyone have any idea how I could improve the performance of the sendmail executable under NT when it is being executed from a PERL(ISAPI) CGI?

-Natasha
[B][/B]

[hschneider]

Hi,

at first you should upgrade to XMail 1.11. Maybe the prob solves itself then.

If not, you should find out where the bottleneck is:
Sendmail takes your mail and creates a spoolfile. The spoolfile is then transmitted by the Mail Transfer Agent. So the prob could be either the interface between your app and sendmail or the time it takes to process the spoolfile in the queue.

I propose to install XMail Queue Manager to track when exactly your message appears in the queue.

Maybe your message queue is trashed with frozen messages which also takes processing time. In that case you should clear your queue with qmanager.

You also should not use filesystem compression on your mailroot, since decompression slows down the whole mail handling.

[natasha]

Thanks for the suggestion(s). I am not compressing on the mailroot drive so that wasn't an issue, however I did take your advice and upgrade to the latest version of XMail and it seems MUCH faster, - however I didn't notice anything in the changelog about improved performance of Sendmail under NT in any of the releases... Perhaps it is the better DNS resolution that is improving things.

Thanks again,
-Natasha

[hschneider]

You can do a little more tuning by
- setting another DNS in file dnsroots
- experimenting with the -Q switches in the registry (see manual under [SMAIL]
Maybe XMail needs 2 or more tries to send a mail and so you can minimize the resending delay.
- Reducing the queue split level (-Mx): So XMail has to search less nested queue folders.
- Optimizing NT for services (see control panel)