[Mailman-Developers] Speaking of pathological behavior...

[Dan Mick]

Dan Mick wrote:
> 
> Now that I'm in the same room with my Mailman server, I notice
> that, at least after setting admin_user_chunksize to 50 (from
> the default 30) that changing one user's "mailto" flag from off
> to on (to disable a user by hand temporarily) beats the living *hell*
> out of the disk, and server.  Something bad wrong is going on there;
> I truss'ed it once and it was continually doing something like
> opening a file, writing it, and closing it.  I don't know what.
> 
> Something's wrong though.  I haven't started to try to look at the
> form-processing code to see what happens.

Specifically, it looks a lot like both of these steps happen for every
member:

1) the archive links are made and unmade
2) the entire config.db.tmp file is rewritten, start to finish

These may be "safety" things, but they're pretty huge performance kills,
especially if, say, one attribute on one member is changing.  Seems like a good
place for a scalability win.  Barry, did you rework this code at all for 2.0beta1?