Re: Postfix and local mail delivery - still relevant in 2020?

[Johnny Billquist <bqt%update.uu.se@localhost>]

On 2020-06-07 07:32, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> 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)?

It's happening with any kind of configuration.

Basically, anything written in C++ is almost a lost cause even before 
starting.

> 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).

postfix alone takes close to a minute to get going at boot time on my 
VAXen...
And that is just counting before rc continues to the next item. I 
haven't checked if postfix are then still being busy actually getting 
things sorted in the background...

> 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).

It's been ages since I looked in the sendmail code (as in more than 20 
years). I didn't consider it to be that horrible, but I guess it might 
have changed, and also standards for "horrible" are rather subjective.

133,000 lines of code is, in my book, a lot. That is not a good sign.

> 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.

Never looked at it.

Anyway, I was mostly wanting to point out that I was disagreeing with 
the statement that postfix was better in sendmail in every aspect. There 
is one measurable aspect where it clearly is not. For much of other 
things, it's a bit subjective...

  Johnny

--
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt%softjar.se@localhost             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol