Interspire Emailmarketer poor performance: 5 emails per 2 seconds - PMTA/EXIM

Question

Can anyone tell me what is holding us back.

I tried every different php script in front end to send emails. Interspire, Oempro, PHP list, PHPknode. But we are only able to send 5 emails every 2 seconds.

We upgraded our server, Our H/W configuration is good. We have used EXIM, We even tried PMTA. Even though our sending speed does not improved.

Our requirement is to send 200,000 - 300,000 emails a day But we need to send this in peak hours i.e. between 9am to 1pm. We are only able to send 15000 emails in 6-7 hours.

I don't know what is the problem, Why are we not able to send emails quickly. Is it because of the PHP script, MTA or the server h/w configuration.

Can anyone please help me with this problem? Any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

I can tell you directly that Interspire Emailmarketer is not especially high-performing. I had a similar situation as you do. We had a high-end server machine, with SAS disks, 16 CPU cores and lots of RAM. We had a highly fine-tuned Postfix MTA and MySQL server (spent a few days configuring those). The performance you get matches our experience. The load in our case was entirely in the PHP script, not the database and not in the MTA.

I suspect that the Interspire software is meant for very low-traffic newsletters (where receivers can be counted in the hundreds).

Answer 2

Interspire by default uses a single php process to process the email queue, and thus it's unable to use multi-core machines. There is a paid multi-processing script called MSH addon which takes IEM processing queue and distributes it across several processor cores for massive speed bonus. From the addons website:

MSH is built around "multi processing library", a multi platform ,shared nothing, multi processing framework inspired by Python multiprocessing module(but very different from api level). It uses "proc family functions" for process spawning and "soq" for IPC.

Disclaimer: I am one of the developers of MSH addon.