Craig Pettersen wrote:

I really like mailman's features but I have a couple questions about virtual domains and mailman. I read that to have unique list names accross domains it's necessary to have separate installations for each domain.

Actually, non-unique list names. Patrick's reply addresses this quite well.

There are work-arounds including running multiple Mailman instances, and patching Mailman. The FAQ at <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.047.htp> summarizes most of what we know about this.

We run email for around 600 domains. Not all have lists but even if we had only 100 we would have 800 qrunner processes running. What kind of resources will all those processes use?

I expect that most of them will be doing nothing most of the time, but they do wake up at intervals of QRUNNER_SLEEP_TIME (default = 1 second) to check their queues. You can set this in mm_cfg.py to any value you want. 1 minute might be more appropriate if you have 800 runners. When they are asleep, they use backing storage to hold their memory image, and presumably there won't be enough real memory for them all to be resident at once so there will be disk i/o when a runner wakes up, pieces get read into RAM, and then modified pieces get written out again to make room for others.

I don't have a good feel for what kind of system resources are required to make this all work well. Perhaps others do.

Is there any way around this problem?

See the FAQ

-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan