> >This is all quite disastrous on low-memory machines, I now need sendmail 
> >running on my machine just to be able to redirect local root mail to 
> >myself (the main mail servers send root mail to the sysadmins), and that 
> >daemon is wasting nearly a Meg of RAM and a process slot (according to 
> >'top').  Postfix isn't any better in this regard.  It has something like 
> >three daemons running in the basic dumb-client configuration.
> 
> well, yes, but then you don't suffer as much in startup costs whenever
> sendmail is invoked to collect local mail, since most of the memory
> will end up shared.  but that's a silly argument.
> 
> your point about postfix is true, but conversely, under high load,
> postfix has a better memory footprint than sendmail.  sendmail starts
> lower tehn postfix, but grows more quickly with load.  postfix starts
> higher, but its growth curve is much shallower under load.  for
> whatever that's worth.

Sadly it's worth nothing in this case.  The machine in question is never 
used to read mail (it all goes to the hub which then spits it out to 
wherever is appropriate), and only generates about 4 messages a day (most 
of those are nightly log runs).  It really isn't cost-effective to be 
running a sendmail daemon for that; yet now there is no choice in the 
matter.

R.