We recently attained a 2,000 e-mail per minute rate by bypassing sendmail and having the PHP script connect to the SMTP directly. The problem with this though is that the SMTP is timing out after 30 seconds. We have searched the script, but there is nothing about a timeout variable. Is this something that would need to be modified elsewhere on the RAQ?
Your php script may be the thing timing our not sendmail Or you may be running out of children You can set a lot of performance entry in sendmail like time outs etc increasing the number of children may be one to look at These will be in the sendmail.cf in your /etc/mail # maximum number of children we allow at one time #O MaxDaemonChildren=12 change this to O MaxDaemonChildren=24 or more but what your load also change this I would double the numbers # load average at which we just queue messages O QueueLA=15 # load average at which we refuse connections O RefuseLA=20 As have a look at this # maximum number of new connections per second #O ConnectionRateThrottle=3