On Mon, 25 Jun 2001 15:35:26 +0200 Dirko van Schalkwyk <dvschalk@ing.sun.ac.za> wrote:

I set Mailman up, created a test list and played with it for a while. Then I send it a big "whopper" 5MB e-mail. I watched the logs and saw postfix running the wrapper. The cron started qrunner and all hell broke lose (over dramatizing a bit). It started running at 100% CPU, where it stayed until I killed it. The message was queued in $prefix/qfiles, it and its little .db file. I had to remove those as well as the locks in $prefix/locks before I could successfully use the list again.

So I thought, "well maybe the pipermail thingy can't handle the huge mime thingies I'm sending it". So I send a smaller attachment <150kb. Things went fine (except for the ugly html page:) ) Send it a 1MB attachment. qrunner started spinning it's wheels again. Had to seek and destroy again.

Having run lists which had posts with attachments in the 100Meg+ range (some people use mail as a file transfer protocol), and had them work (admittedly more than a year ago) I'm fairly certain that this is not a Mailman problem. Its likely to be an MTA problem or a system problem (eg spool space).

Try sending such a post with such a large attachment to yourself through that same mail server. Now try the same thing, but with say 50 copies of the same message being sent to yourself in very rapid succession. What your system closely. What happens?

-- J C Lawrence claw@kanga.nu ---------(*) http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows