Performance
Postfix has been clocked at ~300 message deliveries/second across the Internet, running on commodity hardware (a vintage-2003 Dell 1850 system with battery-backed MegaRAID controller and two SCSI disks). This delivery rate is an order of magnitude below the "intrinsic" limit of 2500 message deliveries/second that was achieved with the mail queue on a RAM disk while delivering to the "discard" transport (with a dual-core Opteron system in 2007).
Mail systems such as Postfix and Qmail achieve high performance by delivering mail in parallel sessions. With mail systems such as Sendmail and Exim that make one connection at a time, high performance can be achieved by submitting limited batches of mail in parallel. Postfix and Qmail also require parallel submission once they reach their intrinsic performance limit, or the performance limits of the hardware or operating system.
It should be noted that the delivery rates cited above are largely academic. With bulk mail delivery, the true delivery rate is primarily determined by the receiver's policies and by the sender's reputation. High-performance email delivery is predominantly a logistical problem.
Read more about this topic: Postfix (software)
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