Peter Kofod wrote:
I am doing something wrong. I am running mailman with about 100 lists (announce only). A couple are pretty big (40K + addresses). They, however, are used infrequently. The big list has one weekly mailing and the others much less often. Currently, there is NO mail queued or being sent (tail -f on maillog is silent), yet doing a top on the mailman process shows mailman consuming 1240M of virtual memory and a task size (RES) of 811M.
See article 4.56 in the FAQ
I am no Linux Performance Tuning expert, but the system seems pretty pokey. This is with no mail going out (and the occasional subscribe / unsubscribe trickling in).
When a mailing goes out, the system becomes virtually unresponsive, usually resulting in a http 500 error. If ssh in to the system, I am eventually able to kill mailman, at which time the system perks right up again. System is a P4 with 1 GB of RAM.
Mailman 2.19rc1
You will find some information by going to the FAQ wizard
Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py
and searching for performance. Article 4.56 will be one of the 16 hits. Not all the others will be relevant, but there is good information there.
I suspect (but it's only a suspicion) that during your 'unresponsive' times, the thing that's going on is SMTP delivery of the message from Mailman to the MTA. Tuning the MTA per the suggestions in the FAQ may help. In particular, if the MTA is doing DNS verification of recipients from Mailman, that's a real killer. There are suggestions in FAQ 4.11.
-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan