On Tue, May 23, 2000 at 10:29:21PM -0400, bwarsaw@python.org wrote:
Very interesting, and good numbers to know. I'm here with a single PIII 650, 256MB and no RAM disk. My currently limiting factor is my IP connection, but that should soon improve considerably.
Well, if you want to eliminate the IP and latency issues and just test Mailman, configure Mailman to go to a null SMTP or /usr/sbin/sendmail program. Eh? Or at the least use recipients at a local SMTP sink.
The 100k deliveries/hr that your seeing -- what size messages are you seeing? Is that relatively constant as a product of the number of
Hmm, those were 3 to 6k messages. I actually didn't see much in the way of change until the size went WAY up -- 50 to 100K. Most of the cost was dealing with file-system meta data -- writing 1K instead of 5K was fairly down in the noise when compared to the meta-data stuff, though to a lesser extent on the RAM disc.
msgs/hr times the number of recipients/msg? Do you think Mailman is the limiting factor to your throughput and have you done any benchmarking of the MM software?
This was not using Mailman at all. Based on the experience with the lists I run, I'd expect mailman to really pound on the machine in addition to this. These messages were generated using a custom program that had a number of processes feeding the queue, and would watch for the queue to fill up and then throttle. Especially important with stock QMail configurations where it's fairly easy to swamp the input queue. The big-todo patch helps this a lot (at around 25k messages with the stock, performance really drops off on ufs-like file-systems).
Which I definitely don't have access to.
We don't at the moment either, but check back later, we may have some spare boxes to run some tests. I also have a stripped down balls-to-the-wall SMTP server that you could use as a sink. This SMTP server on my old laptop (P133 with 40MB RAM and IDE hard drive) was able to handle over distinct incoming messages per second. (or around 360K per hour). I haven't really tested it on a more modern machine.
Sean
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