At Sun, 7 Jun 2020 01:53:34 +0200, Johnny Billquist <bqt%update.uu.se@localhost> wrote: Subject: Re: Postfix and local mail delivery - still relevant in 2020? > > That I disagree with. Being a person who actually runs NetBSD on some > older hardware, postfix is a real resource hog. It takes forever to > start up, while sendmail takes off in no time. I actually like > sendmail, while I find postfix to be way over complicated. > (But yes, I can understand people not liking sendmail.cf, it takes a > bit to grow on you.) Is the slow startup you observe happening with just the default configuration (for local delivery)? Even static-linked it's only a couple of still relatively small processes, just over 1MB RSS each, on my machines. Though I suppose they do have to open and parse a few more config files, and the qmgr process is rather bloated in total size (but it doesn't seem to have to read in much more than 1/4 of itself to get going). As for complexity, well sendmail.cf is just the most visible surface of the problem -- the real issue is inside the code. Postfix does have a somewhat more complex overall design, depending on how you look at it, as it's not just mostly one big monolithic program that's mostly a state machine driver. However the Postfix code is almost trivial to read and comprehend in comparison to Sendmail's code. The whole package is just over 133,000 lines (pure code, comments stripped) of extremely well documented easy-reading code; with the actual programs that run in the default config accounting for fewer than a total of 8000 lines total of code together (i.e. not including the project libs they also make use of). The Research Unix (and Plan-9) UPAS mailer is possibly more elegant than Postfix in both design and implementation, and incredibly small in comparison (at only 9k lines of code _total_), but ultimately it is _far_ less flexible and _far_ less featureful; and probably less scalable. For small machines though it would be a good basic MTA. -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods%acm.org@localhost> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods%robohack.ca@localhost> Planix, Inc. <woods%planix.com@localhost> Avoncote Farms <woods%avoncote.ca@localhost>
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