Why is this so slow?

On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, David Woyciesjes wrote: The combination of Majordomo and Sendmail is notoriously slow at delivery to large mailing lists. Majordomo's out-of-the-box setup is to delegate all of the delivery hassle to Sendmail -- after deciding to forward a given message to the list, it passes it to a Sendmail process along with a list of all of the list's subscribers. The Sendmail processs then sorts the recipients by their MX and runs through the list host by host, one host at a time, until it's done with the delivery. If it takes a couple of minutes to do a particular host delivery (i.e. that host is very slow or it times out), that means that all the machines behind it on the list are delayed by couple of minutes. The end result is that people at the beginning of the list get quick turnaround times and people at the end of the list get variable but generally much longer turnarounds. Solutions to this problem are 1) not to care, 2) to switch from Sendmail to a mail transport agent like Qmail or Postfix that parallelizes its deliveries, 3) to switch from Majordomo to a mailing list manager that either breaks deliveries into smaller chunks (LISTSERV) or handles delivery on its own (Lyris), or 4) to patch Majordomo so that it sorts recipient lists and breaks them into chunks before passing them on to Sendmail. Majordomo 2.0, which is still not out of beta, does this out of the box. Many moons ago (almost 80?) I wrote a FAQ about all this stuff for comp.mail.list-admin.software, and this particular section is still relevant. It's at http://www.docnorm.com/mlmfaq. Norm Aleks