Re: Re: SMTP vs mail()

Hello, on 01/15/2008 08:54 AM Stut said the following: >>>>>> If you have your sendmail equivalent program properly configured, >>>>>> no >>>>>> SMTP connection is used when queueing messages using the sendmail >>>>>> program. >>>>> What about when you take into consideration this program could be >>>>> sending 1000's of emails, say, 100 per SMTP connection? >>>> That is even worse. Keep in mind that the SMTP server of sendmail or >>>> equivalent MTA, ends up calling the sendmail program for each >>>> individual >>>> message that it receives. >>> That would be the most brain-dead SMTP server on the planet... >>> >>> Are you talking Windows or something? :-) >> >> On the contrary, you may be surprised, but this is precisely inline with >> Unix/Linux spirit. Small programs communicating through pipes that >> execute individual tasks each and then exit. Unlike Windows, forking new >> programs is not so expensive. >> >> Anyway, you may want to check these diagrams to learn the architecture >> or sendmail and qmail and verify what I am saying: >> >> 1��W- >> :�8�<���Thttp://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/sm-X/design-2005-05-05/main/node3.html#SECTION00310000000000000000��᧰��Bm�� >> � >> >> >> http://www.nrg4u.com/qmail/the-big-qmail-picture-103-p1.gif > > I can't see anywhere in that where it says a new process is spawned for > each message. Sendmail is a beast but it's not that bad. I'm sure you > *could* configure it to do that, but you'd need to explicitly make that > decision yourself. > > Where do you think it says that? Check the source Luke! ;-) Well the diagram shows that the the SMTP server calls the queue manager. Admitedly it is not clear that it forks a new process to inject the message in the queue, but you can analyze the source to check it out. I have checked the sendmail SMTP server source once in the past. I suppose it hasn't changed that much. Last time I analyzed it I could see it reads each message from the TCP socket into a file passing it through eventual mail filters (miltering) and in the end of each message it forks the queue manager process to inject the message in the queue. -- Regards, Manuel Lemos PHP professionals looking for PHP jobs http://www.phpclasses.org/professionals/ PHP Classes - Free ready to use OOP components written in PHP http://www.phpclasses.org/