[Mimedefang] how many multiplexors

[David F. Skoll]

On Tue, 25 Mar 2003, Joseph Brennan wrote:

> Given sendmail running with a reasonable QueueLA and RefuseLA,
> controlling the system load, what effect does the multiplexor
> maximum have?

Very little.  While there is a tiny penalty to having lots of unused
slaves, it's so small as to be statistical noise.  If you usually have
10 busy slaves, for example, you won't notice any difference if the
maximum is set to 20 or to 200.

The reason the number of busy slaves is typically less than the number of
Sendmail processes is that slaves are busy only when they're actually
doing something, whereas Sendmail processes hang around waiting for
network traffic and disk I/O.

> Is it sensible to set it very high just as a
> sanity check, or should I try to tune it pretty close to what
> I expect to need?

Set it higher than you think you need.

Regards,

David.