--On March 20, 2006 10:08:43 AM -0400 Bruno Robichaud 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> What I mean by large scale its maybe at least one Millions email per day
> as example, the way I use listserv is by providing listserv the list of
> our subscribed with our homemade system which it could send 4-5 merge
> distribute command job to listserv in one batch so it mean that listserv
> would need to process these command so that why I need to turn it up
> because listserv going to have to do a lot of work. I'm not sure what I
> have for hardware right now this is something I have to check with the
> network guy. I'm not sure of the limit of work that listserv can do.

ListServ itself really doesn't need gobs and gobs of hardware.  It doesn't 
do most of the work.  Your MTA (MTAs) on the other hand do quite a bit of 
work.  Fast disks, or ramdisks, for spools aren't a bad idea.  You can have 
multipel MTAs.

But.  Honestly.  At only 1/mln/day, a beat up old celeron with IDE HDDs 
could do it.  Now if you want that 1mln out in a short timeperiod ramdrives 
or MTA tuning might be necessary.  If your email lists are crap and full of 
bad addresses -- they probably are if you've been maintaining your own 
solution, even when we moe lists from mailman or majordomo or anything else 
to ListServ, if we have auto-delete on the list at all it inevitable sheds 
a large number of subscribers, not ListServs fault, it's just catching more 
bounces -- you'll need more hardware.

If you're doing this as separate envelopes (IE as a 'customized' mail 
merge) you'll want to think about Windows and LSMTP.  Envelopes are what 
kill mail servers not volume.  If you've a relatively low number of 
envelopes/transactions with large numbers of recipients it's pretty 
efficient.  But if you've a 1-1 envelope-to-recipient as with a customized 
mail merge then you'll need more horsepower in the MTA.

Bottom line is it's the MTA or MTAs that will really limit your performance 
more than anything.  With 200k+ persons per DIST job HPO might not be a bad 
idea either, but it probably won't be your limiting factor.