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On Jan 30, 2004, at 5:52 AM, Kevin McCann wrote:
You know damn good and well that this is not a CPU issue. This
is a disk I/O capacity issue (synchronous meta-data updates). Moreover, you also know full well that there are serious performance issues with enabling personalization mode on large mailing lists, such that for some lists, it would simply be impossible to do.
Why is it, then, that Lyris can send personalized messages to lists with hundreds of thousands of members with no problem?
Lyris has made the choice it's worth it. So has mailman with personalization.
Brad is right that I trivialized some resource issues last night -- but that doesn't change my belief that for the user, it's worth using those resources to improve things for them. You don't want to waste resources; you also don't want to not use them when it's the right thing to do.
Barry and others will be (or are) working on Mailman 3. I think that he/they should take a long hard look at the commercial MLM success story (Lyris) and take a few pages out of that book. They spent millions of dollars on R&D and made decisions base on it. Why not tap into that? Personalized delivery is just one thing. Don't get me started on SQL issues and the need for vastly improved logging for forensic purposes.
Better yet, look at the users. They aren't geeks any more. They're your mom and dad, off on a cable modem somewhere. A cable modem who has been through two or three acquisitions and domain name changes, and these folks aren't really sure what their email address is (their smart son configured their computer for them), much less what it was three changes ago when they signed up for the list.
and now they want to turn it off and go on vacation for a month, and the plane leaves in six hours.
If they can't -- it's your fault, as admin. And they're right.
that's why personalization matters.