[Mailman-Developers] Re: your mail

[John Viega]

On Thu, May 28, 1998 at 10:29:17PM -0400, Corbett Klempay wrote:
> Does anyone have any quantitative (or maybe even non-quantitative) idea of
> Mailman's performance, especially compared to direct competitors such as
> Majordomo?

It's more efficient than Majordomo, especially when doing bulk mailing.

> Do we know of any very high volume lists being run on Mailman

How high volume?  I know of some lists with 5000+ users, they don't
seem to have any problems.  The biggest one I run has been over 2000
strong.

> (or is this even a good idea?).  I imagine that something like ezmlm would
> probably obliterate both Majordomo as well as Mailman as far as
> performance, but I don't see the average list needing the kind of fiendish
> performance ezmlm provides (don't me wrong; ezmlm has a lot to recommend
> it); most people could (and would) trade ezmlm's speed for Mailman's slick
> web interface.  But what I'm wondering is do we know how big this
> performance tradeoff is?

You'd do a lot better performance wise trading sendmail for qmail than
Mailman for ezmlm.  Also, within a few months we're going to have an
option to keep mailman as a persistant server, to avoid the costs
involved of always starting up.

> Also, I saw that there was a mention on the TODO list about adding support
> for other MTAs (such as qmail).  Has anyone implemented this on their own
> yet?  Would providing support for qmail affect (enhance) performance much?

I'm working on this feature as we speak.  Like I said, the underlying
mail transport is more important than the MLM software in terms of how
many messages you can push through a machine.

> I'm trying to (seeing how smooth Mailman is) see what kind of potential
> user base there will be; I'm wondering at what point the list becomes too
> speed-critical to allow use of Mailman.  Any comments?

Well, I think that the current way the locking is done might cause
some problems on lists that have large, large numbers of users AND get
tons of users.  I don't know how large those numbers are yet, but the
big list I run has gotten 100 posts in an hour before, without
problem.

The locking is going to eventually become more fine-grained, so even
for the largest lists, I don't think it'll be a problem.

John