Overview
As email traffic continues to increase, system administrators must be able to guarantee that their email servers can deliver reliable performance today and bear larger loads tomorrow. sendmail Performance Tuning is a practical guide to building, tuning, and testing email servers based on sendmail to function more efficiently, handle more messages, and resist both accidental and malicious load-related incidents.
Covering sendmail 8.12 as well as earlier versions, this book begins with an introduction to sendmail and performance tuning. Author Nick Christenson describes best practices for building, installing, and maintaining a system and then details proven techniques for tuning email relaying, reception, and sending. The author's strategic guide to configuration and security is followed by precise directions for managing bottlenecks and load testing. By the book's end, readers should know exactly how to optimize system performance.
Key topics include:
- A detailed description of the step-by-step operations that occur during email transmission and reception.
- How to send and store email most efficiently
- What the performance characteristics of POP and IMAP are
- How to determine which sendmail configuration parameters might improve performance
- How to locate and eliminate bottlenecks
- Methods and pitfalls in testing email servers before they are installed in a production environment
Whether you are looking for a quick fix for an immediate problem ordeeper understanding of email servers, sendmail Performance Tuning provides clear guidance and valuable insight.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewIn recent years, email traffic and message sizes have both soared. As a result, sendmail servers that had enormous headroom a year or two ago are slowing under the load. Whether you’re using the latest version of sendmail (8.12) or an earlier version, sendmail Performance Tuning delivers comprehensive, thoroughly benchmarked guidance for squeezing out every last drop of performance.
Nick Christenson begins with optimizations you can make outside of sendmail, including reducing the latency of DNS lookup requests and providing a separate disk for swap space. Next, he turns to sendmail, offering detailed techniques for improving performance on “typical,” CPU-bound, and I/O bound servers. You’ll learn how to tune relaying (where bottlenecks often arise due to limits in how quickly mail queue directory files can be created and deleted). Christenson covers both email reception and sending, covering everything from eliminating unnecessary disk writes to generating mass mailings on the fly via UNIX processes. He offers practical guidance on finding and eliminating bottlenecks; as well as a full chapter on load generation and testing.
If nobody’s offering to buy you a new server today, relax. Then, get this book. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.