Sendmail slow?

[Knute Johnson]

Knute Johnson wrote:
> 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.
> 

Wireshark shows a 5 second period between the connection to port 587 and 
the 220 message from sendmail.  That's where my problem is.

Do you know of any configuration that would cause that sort of a delay?

Thanks,

-- 

Knute Johnson

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

   H.L. Mencken