Sendmail on a multiprocessor box

[J.P]

I am running Sendmail on IBM hardware (AIX(UNIX) OS) which has 2 CPU's and was wondering if Sendmail will naturally utilise both CPU's when functioning or if you have to tell it do so (like you can do with BIND)
I have run through the Sendmail O'Reilly manual and checked the www.sendmail.org site but can't find the answer I am looking for.

Thanks,
James...

[_dobbo_]

AS I understand it, sendmail starts a process for every incoming connection - eg if I send 50 emails concurrently, 50 instances of SMTP will be executed.

As such I'd expect the operating system to manage CPU load, rather than sendmail itself - but then again Sendmail is smelly and horrible and the only involvement I have with it is to remove it from whatever *nix distro I'm installing, so what would I know....

[aldi]

Don't know the answer but has AIX got something like linux 'top' so you can just watch the processes and their processor utillisation/affinity?

[zumbruk]

_dobbo_ said:

but then again Sendmail is smelly and horrible and the only involvement I have with it is to remove it from whatever *nix distro I'm installing,

[malman]

depending on the version of AIX you may have "topas" I think it came with 4.3.3 and above. If not you can get monitor (very similar but works on 4.2 down) from the Bull utility archive. Bull did and possibly still do AIX systems.

topas -i1 will show you all kinds of stuff every 1 sec (press h for help)

but as already stated sendmail fires off a process for each connection so it will get assinged by AIX to a processor.

Monitor was able to show each CPU indiviually if I remember correctly but topas doesn't.

Expecting lots of mail?

[tinman0]

J.P said:

I am running Sendmail on IBM hardware (AIX(UNIX) OS) which has 2 CPU's and was wondering if Sendmail will naturally utilise both CPU's when functioning or if you have to tell it do so (like you can do with BIND) I have run through the Sendmail O'Reilly manual and checked the www.sendmail.org site but can't find the answer I am looking for. Thanks, James...

if the daemons spawn (as per normal) when its working then yes it should utilise both processors on aix. i was under the impression that you only had to use multi processor compiled software when you had a piece of software that ran as a single process.