@ Chuq Von Rospach (chuqui@plaidworks.com) :
Okay, here's a first cut at some data.
Very interesting! Doubling the bandwith needed might or not be a problem. My systems delivers 10K messages at the mean rate of 18000 per hour. When I send a message down a 130 000 subscribers' list, well, I have to wait quite long befoore it's gone ; maybe I should buy some more bandwith. I'm ready to take up the VERP approach, even if it means twice longer sends.
However there's another performance issue: how does postfix react when it's got sent 130 000 emails to store and forward? Currently I send it about 10000 messages that it breaks up one by one using. I don't know about memory or disk issues there, but 130 000 * 10k = 1.3 Gbytes on disk: there might be more to consider than speed issues. I'd love to see it working that way though. Would spare a lot users' and admin's nerves.
(By the way currently my larger lists aare not handled by Mailman but by sympa, 'coz I needed to keep a copy of the subscribers' names in order to spot them easier in the list when they want to unsubscribe and don't know what their address was...)
What do y'all think? I've included mailman-developers on this reply, since while this started on mm-users, it really ought to be discussed on the developers list...
-- Fil