Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of nurikabe
nurikabe

asked on

Fastest Mail Server

Any idea what the fastest mail server would be?  From testing we've done, I know that postfix is faster than sendmail.  I'm wondering, however, about qmail and xmail.  Any others?

Ideally I'm looking for some reliable benchmarks.

Thanks!
Avatar of pjedmond
pjedmond
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

I think that Xmail is a 'lighter' and less complex server, so I'm tempted to say that it should be faster....but so much depends on optimisations in the correct place. Also Xmail is designed to be 'standalon' rather than integrating into the current *nix setup.

As a result, it is virtually impossible to match benchmarksas both Xmail and Qmail can cope with more that the maximum bandwidth on an 100MBs ethernet connection on a reasonable spec machine...and how do you confirm that you are running like with like...Do you use Xmail as just an SMTP server and POP server, and compare it with Qmail+VPop?......in which case it is faster.

Just as an aside (with respect to throughput) I did a comparisom of XMail against DBMail, and found that for smaller installations with low volumes, XMail coped better than DBMail...but if I started being ridiculous, and sending hundreds of huge emails, the number of emails processed and 'delivered' was again initially slower, but after a few hours of constant handling, the DBMail (using MySQL) started handling the incoming mail faster....so yet another factor (mail spool sizes) can make a difference. I regret that depending on the coding, so servers will operate better than others at some mail volume, but change the mail volume, or alter memory/disc speed etc then the situation may be reversed.

All I can really say on this is 'horses for courses', and in order to find which works best for you, I recommend that you try and test the server with as close to real traffic as the system is likely to experience and work from there.

HTH:)
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of pjedmond
pjedmond
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of arecord
arecord

For your question, postfix is a fast mail server. I think it also the best one to use (specially you are use sendmail before). As you know qmail is the best on security, postfix comes on the next. since both build with a lot of small programs, so they both are faster then send mail. postfix can over take qmail by speed. I don't know much about Xmail, can't help you there, but again, I think postfix is the best one to use as a mail server.

good luck

Johnny
sendmail, qmail, postfix - can't hold candle to any one of these.

www.port25.com
www.ironport.com
www.postalengine.com
and ..a qmail spinoff - (robomail) http://www.inter7.com/?page=robomail