Hi All...

I have a problem that I'm not sure how to overcome.
Sendmail wont fork a new child for each message to multiple recipients.

If sending different messages to different domains it appears to, but
sending one message to multiple domains uses only one sendmail process
it does not spawn others and do them all in parallel like Qmail and
exim etc do, this can make for a slow process on a mailing list
server, I prefer to not replace sendmail as I'm sure this is possible, I
do have the conf option forkeachjob defined.

After a lot of google-ing, I have tried a few things like ensuring I don't
have queue children set or a few other max settings...But the little devil
just wont do it.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

In article <pan.2006.09.19.04.22.27.1555@westnet.com.au> NM
<nomail@westnet.com.au> writes:
>
>I have a problem that I'm not sure how to overcome.
>Sendmail wont fork a new child for each message to multiple recipients.

Um, that isn't the problem you describe below...

>If sending different messages to different domains it appears to, but
>sending one message to multiple domains uses only one sendmail process
>it does not spawn others and do them all in parallel like Qmail and
>exim etc do, this can make for a slow process on a mailing list
>server, I prefer to not replace sendmail as I'm sure this is possible, I
>do have the conf option forkeachjob defined.

So, there is *one* message, and consequently "a new child for each
message" still means only one child. And btw, ForkEachJob only applies
to queue runs, but maybe you are submitting the messages with
DeliveryMode=queue.

But anyway, the way to achieve what you actually want, i.e. having a
single message split into multiple jobs that can be run in parallel
(and during submission they will be run in parallel even without
ForkEachJob AFAIK), is to use the queue group functionality. E.g. with
an example shamelessly stolen from Nick Christenson's excellent book
"sendmail Performance Tuning":

[...] limit the maximum number of recipients per envelope to 10 for the
default queue:

QUEUE_GROUP(`mqueue', `P=/var/spool/mqueue, r=10')

--Per Hedeland
per@hedeland.org