On 4/8/2010 12:15 AM, Gaël Lams wrote:
Actually the emails finally went out, it just takes them a few hours (probably more last week) to be processed. Regarding mailman's queue, I still have to read the documentation to understand how it works because I remember checking this queue but didn't see a lot of files. Is it that, if I send an email to a list with 11000 members, only one file is created there?
Yes. There is only one file per post in the out/ queue regardless of the number of recipients. You can tell when the queue is seriously backlogged from the 'smtp' log. A "normal" log looks like
Apr 08 07:47:05 2010 (20026) <msg-id> smtp to list for 209 recips, completed in 4.658 seconds Apr 08 08:00:03 2010 (20026) <msg-id> smtp to list for 1 recips, completed in 0.020 seconds Apr 08 08:00:09 2010 (20026) <msg-id> smtp to list for 1 recips, completed in 0.018 seconds Apr 08 08:30:50 2010 (20026) <msg-id> smtp to list for 206 recips, completed in 4.661 seconds Apr 08 09:45:13 2010 (20026) <msg-id> smtp to list for 206 recips, completed in 4.107 seconds Apr 08 11:06:37 2010 (20026) <msg-id> smtp to list for 209 recips, completed in 4.489 seconds Apr 08 11:09:55 2010 (20026) <msg-id> smtp to list for 209 recips, completed in 4.009 seconds
Note that we are delivering on the order of 45 to 50 recipients per second (with full Mailman VERP so a separate SMTP transaction per recipient) and the queue is not backlogged.
With a backlogged queue, each entry has a timestamp which is equal to the previous entry's timestamp plus this entry's processing time so there's no idle time between entries.
As it seems now to be a tuning problem, I started having a look at the mailman's wiki page on performance tuning. Reference is made there to QRUNNER_LOCK_LIFETIME, QRUNNER_PROCESS_LIFETIME, and QRUNNER_MAX_MESSAGES. I did a grep on my mailman's installation but did not find them (I've mailman 2.1.13).
Those were Mailman 2.0.x settings.
Knowing that I host +/- 50 mailing lists, most of them small (3'/40 users) but a few with between 2000 and 11700 users, I'm trying to understand what I can do to improve the tuning.
I will also have a look later at postfix's configuration (I will anyway have to do something there because both yahoo and hotmail are slowing us, temporarily refusing the connection) but the fact is that these emails I was waiting for were not in postfix's queue.
The Postfix tuning FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/rIA9> may help.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan