start multiple sendmail daemons from rc.conf?

[Charles Swiger]

On Nov 25, 2003, at 12:56 PM, Bill Vermillion wrote:
>> Is it possible to start multiple sendmail daemons (using -C
>> /different/cf) from rc.conf?
>
> Will this give a different perfomance than the way Sendmail forks
> and runs children.  I had 186 sendmail instances running last week
> during a big flood of incoming mail.
>
> I'm curious on this point - and will having multiple daemons
> improve performance?

To an extent; one way that multiple sendmail daemons could help is by 
configuring "queue groups", which is a mechanism for splitting outgoing 
mail into different spools-- each being processed by its own daemon-- 
based on the recipient's domain.

It's most useful for destination domains which you send a lot of mail 
to and which are somewhat unreliable (ie, their SMTP servers aren't 
always accepting mail).

On the other hand, too many sendmail processes can thrash the system...

-- 
-Chuck