Exim optimization to reduce load on high amount of emails

euro-space

• April 19, 2014 06:04

Hi, Along with few others running under OpenVZ, I have three VPS accounts (4GB RAM, 4 Burst RAM, 4 CPU's), which are used for sending large amounts of emails to the subscribed clients periodically, so when the mail-lists are being submitted, host server load averages raise up to 20 - 35 (these VPS averages from 0.5 go to 8-15), and after sending is finishing (after few hours usually), then host server comes back to normal load of 1 -2 . I use Exim and cPanel on those VPS accounts. I'd much appreciate if someone would recommend best settings for Exim for this situation, to reduce load and protect other accounts from suffering by poor performance and high IO times. Thanks a lot!

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  cPanelMichael

  • April 21, 2014 13:17

  Hello :) I'm not sure there is much you could do to optimize the Exim configuration itself, but you could limit the number of emails sent out per hour for those accounts to ensure the server load does not reach those levels. How large are the email lists? Thank you.

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  euro-space

  • April 21, 2014 21:21

  Hi, Thanks for your reply, ok, I limit sending total emails per account per hour, however these emails should be delivered and the list is with about 15000-16000 recipients. any advice? Thanks a lot.

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  vanessa

  • April 21, 2014 21:28

  In addition to cPanelMichael's suggestion, you can also perhaps throttle on a per-email basis. Most mailing list apps have this option now to, for example, send a certain # of emails per second, or wait a certain amount of time between each send. This will obviously take longer to send the list, but Exim itself isn't necessarily in need of resource optimization - each email you send forks a separate process, and load is based on specific states of processes running on the system. So if you want to send a large amount of email at time, your only other option really would be to send from a box with more CPU available to it, or consider sending your email from a server separate from where your other accounts are hosted.

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  euro-space

  • April 22, 2014 12:05

  Hi, Thanks for the update, I'll consider your advice.

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