Question : newsletter setup

Ok first, I know this should be worth more points, but I'm running low... This is all I have ;)

I'm running a subscription newsletter (yeah, people are PAYING!) and right now it's just sending out about 5000 emails, but they all have to go out in the morning.  I had to slow my php script down that does the letters because sendmail was rejecting connections when the load got over 10... Which is fine.

This sendmail is OUTBOUND ONLY (well, except for the script that creates them on the same machine.)  What's the best way to configure for a newsletter?

I set delivery for Deferred.

How can I make it start, say 10, outbound daemons?

Should I set the Time before giving up to something like 10m (If they don't get it the first try, I don't want to spend any more time on them)

Anything else going to speed this thing up?

Answer : newsletter setup

I can delete this question, but if you still want to solve this...

500 outgoing emails shouldn't be a problem. A high load average could well mean that you have a local resource problem. The first thing I'd check would be to make sure that there's enough installed memory and that you aren't asking too much of the system in terms of competing applications (web servers, databases, etc).  Next I'd want to be sure that the DNS server you use returns results on lookups quickly. And then I'd want to make sure that the server wasn't starved for bandwidth on your Internet link.

On the sendmail side you want to allow an immediate delivery attempt (remove Deferred) and implement aged queueing (see the comments in remqueue.pl in the Sendmail distribution). Aged queueing keeps messages that can't be delivered quickly from clogging up the queue.

In your PHP code you want to watch the load average and feed messages to sendmail only fast enough to keep the LA at a reasonable value. For a fast machine with plenty of memory and a fast Internet connection (=>T1 speed) a load average of 6-8 is probably as much as you want. Note that you'll want to up Sendmail's limit to about 16.