[Mailman-Users] Performance Issue?

[Mark Sapiro]

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Trevor Dodds wrote:
> 
> I have a list of 5000 users, this is a newsletter only list and is
> currently the only list on our server the server has lots of free
> memory and cpu does not run high. The problem I'm faced is that when
> an email is sent to the list it takes a while before mailman starts
> sending the email to sendmail. This process took over 2 hours.  Is It
> normal for mailman to send bunches of around 300 users per mail shot?


Mailman sends to all recipients and then logs the send in Mailman's
'post' and 'smtp' logs. The smtp log entry will tell you how may
recipients were sent and how long the entire smtp interaction took.

The actual smtp interaction consists of multiple transactions with
perhaps as few as 1 recipient each or as many as SMTP_MAX_RCPTS (default
500) each, depending on other settings such as VERP.


> Is there anything I can do to speed up email between mailman /
> sendmail?


For 5000 recipients, the entire smtp interaction should take at most a
few minutes, not hours. The main performance killer is the MTA doing DNS
verifies on every address. The MTA should be configured not to do this.

There's more on this in the FAQ wizard
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py>. Search for performance. FAQs
4.11 and 6.3 are of particular relevance for sendmail.

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

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