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I have a netbook running opensuse 11.2 I'm trying to make it run faster by disabling services, and I would like to kill off postfix as I don't ever use it (As far as i actually know) What harm could come from disabling postfix, if any? (I don't use any kind of email programs on it, all web based)

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Postfix is not slowing your netbook down in the first place, so while there's probably not a great deal of harm, there is no benefit either. Use htop to identify the actual processes that are using CPU and RAM.

I run Ubuntu on a netbook, and once I upgraded to 1GB of RAM it ran reasonably fast. One suspects that RAM shortage is the bottleneck for most netbooks.

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I have 2 gig, so disabling it probably doesn't do much. Disabling swap speed it up quite a bit thought. – alpha1 Feb 28 '10 at 19:54
If you have 2 gig of RAM and you're swapping, you are doing something very weird. Are you rendering huge 3D animations on a netbook or something? – CarlF Mar 1 '10 at 9:49
I just had installed swap as I always did, new to the linux laptop thing, and my other linux box has low ram and one is a server, so they swap. Both sub 1gig. I did disable the swap a while back and its been running better since, so postfix can probably stay enabled. – alpha1 Mar 1 '10 at 18:30
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up vote 2 down vote

Some programs alert the administrative user of problems via email - but if you check your logs on a regular basis this should not be an issue.

Another thing to consider is the possibility that a program that wants to notify an administrator may abort without finishing if it fails to email (this is hypothetical though).

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Note that fetchmail may send messages to port 25 (which postfix usually monitors). If you are not using this mail retriever, then you do not need postfix running.

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