Campaign Software Performance

Can Campaign software handle your list? Yes, it can, but only if you have the supporting hardware and bandwidth. The speed of your SMTP server is also a big factor. Here's a more detailed explanation:

Email Merging And Delivery Performance
In any email merging and delivery system, the email list is: 1) read from the database, 2) merged into unique messages, 3) sent to the SMTP server for delivery, then 4) delivered to the recipient. Naturally, each of these steps takes some time.

In nearly all real-world applications we've seen (and here at Arial Software, we've worked with thousands of active email marketing customers), the biggest bottlenecks are steps 3 and 4 (the SMTP server and the bandwidth).

Bandwidth Bottlenecks
If you don't have sufficient bandwidth to support the email, even the fastest computer in the world won't help you. So before you get started, view our bandwidth requirements chart to see how much bandwidth you really need. Keep in mind that the chart is calculated based on a 10k message size (approximately 10,000 bytes). If you send larger messages or attachments, you will need more bandwidth than shown in the chart.

If you discover you have insufficient bandwidth, you will either need to wait longer for the emails to be sent (it might take more hours to send, for example), or you will need to acquire more bandwidth.

SMTP Server Bottlenecks
SMTP servers must queue and deliver all email. To use Campaign, you'll need to tell it the IP address of your SMTP server. Microsoft includes a free SMTP server with Windows 2000 (it's part of the IIS package), but you can also purchase SMTP server software from other companies.

A slow SMTP software application can really bog down performance. Sendmail for Windows, for example, is known to be one of the slowest SMTP servers on the market. According to a Sendmail salesperson called by Arial Software, Sendmail will send no more than 10,000 emails per hour, no matter how large your bandwidth. (Sendmail has much higher performance on Linux and Unix machines, however.)

Because Campaign software is extremely fast, it can usually overload an SMTP server, causing the SMTP to stop responding while it catches up. Our Bulletproof Mailer™ automatically detects this condition, pauses the mail queuing process, and waits for the SMTP server to catch its breath before continuing. This behavior may appear as if Campaign is slow, but, in fact, Campaign is waiting on the SMTP.

To solve this problem, consider investing in a high-end SMTP server application.

Maximum Performance
When SMTP server and bandwidth bottlenecks are removed, Campaign supports up to 100,000 emails per hour when talking to a standard SMTP server, or up to 400,000 emails per hour when using a robust mail transfer agent.

This level of performance is only achieved on a high-end system: dual Pentium III processors (1.4GHz), 1GB RAM, 1Gbit Ethernet connection and a RAID 5 array of SCSI-160 hard drives. Systems with slower hardware configurations will experience slower performance.