[Mailman-Users] Performance on mailman

[Mark Sapiro]

Peter Kofod wrote:

>I am doing something wrong.  I am running mailman with about 100 lists
>(announce only).  A couple are pretty big (40K + addresses).  They,
>however, are used infrequently.  The big list has one weekly mailing and
>the others much less often.  Currently, there is NO mail queued or being
>sent (tail -f on maillog is silent), yet doing a top on the mailman
>process shows mailman consuming 1240M of virtual memory and a task size
>(RES) of 811M.


See article 4.56 in the FAQ


>I am no Linux Performance Tuning expert, but the system seems pretty
>pokey.  This is with no mail going out (and the occasional subscribe /
>unsubscribe trickling in).
>
>When a mailing goes out, the system becomes virtually unresponsive,
>usually resulting in a http 500 error.  If ssh in to the system, I am
>eventually able to kill mailman, at which time the system perks right up
>again.  System is a P4 with 1 GB of RAM.
>
>Mailman 2.19rc1


You will find some information by going to the FAQ wizard

>Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py

and searching for performance. Article 4.56 will be one of the 16 hits.
Not all the others will be relevant, but there is good information
there.

I suspect (but it's only a suspicion) that during your 'unresponsive'
times, the thing that's going on is SMTP delivery of the message from
Mailman to the MTA. Tuning the MTA per the suggestions in the FAQ may
help. In particular, if the MTA is doing DNS verification of
recipients from Mailman, that's a real killer. There are suggestions
in FAQ 4.11.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan