speed of mail() on two servers

Hi, all -- I'm working up a [cli] script to send a personalized (ugh) email to some [often large] number of web site subscribers. Unfortunately, I'm getting lousy performance, running about 0.54 sec per email. My partner has a mail script implemented on another machine and he's running somewhere down around 0.10 sec per email, which is better but still not very good for sending to 60k users. The box (dual Xeon 2.2G with mirrored fast SCSI and 1G RAM) has plenty of horsepower, and it certainly shouldn't need more. It's running RH 7.3 (Valhalla) with 2.4.20 on ext3 and has qmail installed as its MTA. It seems to be the mail() call itself, because I can make a system call (system, exec, passthru) to just echo the current data and it rips through my list in nothin' flat. So how do I tune mail() to make it faster? Or do I need to give up and call qmail-inject directly? TIA & HAND :-D -- David T-G * There is too much animal courage in (play) davidtg@justpickone.org * society and not sufficient moral courage. (work) davidtgwork@justpickone.org -- Mary Baker Eddy, "Science and Health" http://justpickone.org/davidtg/ Shpx gur Pbzzhavpngvbaf Qrprapl Npg!