[Clark Evans]
As I was adding users to a list (probably around a thousand?), I got the error at the bottom.
I have experimented somewhat with adding lots of users to Mailman lists, and found that if the mass subscribe process takes to long, the CGI script is killed off by the server (and leaves me with a Netscape popup window saying "Document contained no data").
Apparently, for Apache, the appropriate config option is "Timeout" -- which defaults to 300 (= 5 minutes).
If the server kills off the CGI script at a bad time -- in the middle of saving the list config db -- you'll experience problems like you describe.
The solution is to replace the list's corrupted config.db with the previous version, called config.db.last.
Possible solutions I can think of:
Speeding up the mass subscribe processing:
Currently, when adding lots of members from the web interface, the list config db is saved after each addition, and then finally once more at the end.
I'm considering changing this so that only the "final" save is done. That would speed up the mass subscription processing considerably -- and thus the CGI will be more likely to finish within "Timeout" -- and also reduce the risk of the script being killed off at a bad time, as only _one_ config save will be performed.
However, such a change will also mean that _if_ the CGI is killed off, _none_ of the intended list changes have been saved.
Make sure the CGI script _isn't_ killed:
If the Mailman CGI scripts are changed to ignore SIGTERM signals, would the problem go away? I don't know enough about CGI scripting to say for sure, but my guess would be that _some_ server kills off timed-out processes with SIGKILL.
And, even if the script isn't killed, the server will still close the connection on timeout -- leaving me with "The document contained no data" popup windows.
If anyone have other, better ways of solving this, let me know...
-- Harald