Sendmail slow?

[Knute Johnson]

Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-02-13 at 14:48 -0800, Knute Johnson wrote:
>> Anybody know why sendmail is so slow to respond initially to a sent 
>> email?  When I hit the send button it takes about 8 seconds for the 
>> email to go.  I'm running Ubuntu server 8.10 and sendmail 8.14.3.  I had 
>> my mail server on a Fedora box before this and it would send mail 
>> immediately upon hitting the send button in my mail client.  As far as I 
>> can tell, sendmail is configured identically to the old Fedora box.  I 
>> have greet pause enabled but disabled for my sending address.  If I 
>> enable it for my address it takes that much longer, so I know at least 
>> that is working correctly.  Any ideas where to start looking would be 
>> greatly appreciated.
> 
> Could be a host lookup issue.  Your local mail agent sends to localhost
> which should be mapped to 127.0.0.1.  A reverse lookup is needed to
> display the hostname in the greeting message.  You could be seeing the
> timeout delay.  Check /etc/hosts for an entry for the 127.0.0.1 address.

Thanks for the idea.  The localhost is in /etc/hosts.  I think I'll put 
the wireshark on it though and see if there is some delay doing the DNS. 
  The server is located locally but I am looking up the addresses.

-- 

Knute Johnson

"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge 
to rule."

   H.L. Mencken