[Mailman-Developers] Re: [Mailman-Users] Allowing users to join without specifying pas swords

[J C Lawrence]

On Sun, 17 Jun 2001 00:46:47 -0700 
Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> wrote:

> On Friday, June 15, 2001, at 01:19 PM, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:

> I would set Mailman's 2.1 default to have this turned ON...

Agreed.

> Barry's mileage may vary on his preferences for default, of
> course, and it's his show. I think the advantages of the
> customized URL/email capability is a huge one and most sites will
> benefit from it -- but the network hit might kill some sites, so
> we have to give them an easy ability to turn the feature off.

You also ignore local physical resource consumption.  Network
bandwidth and expense are not always the only constraining factors.
Mail systems tend to be disk IO constrained in addition to network
bound with file creat()/open() being the biggies.  Given a busy box
that tends to maintain a significant backlog, under VERP/RCPT_TO=1
inode exhaustion becomes a more probable case than with larger
envelopes (similar/identical curves to above).

  Yes, real mail admins know to mkfs /var/spool with a higher inode
  count than the rest of their systems.  I'll let you guess what
  percentage of mail admins actually do.

There are quite a few lists out there running off i486 boxes with
small disks.  Some of them have nice bandwidth but have horrible
disk IO.

  ObExample: Up until fairly recently svlug.org (which runs mailman)
  was an i486.  Excellent outbound bandwidth.  Lousy local physical
  resources.  Subscriber base there is in the low/middle single
  digit thousands IIRC.  (Thanks to VA things are much better now)

The README should enclude notes on these factors as well.

> What do y'all think? 

I suspect Nigel Metherington is going to chime in here,

I'm interested in also seeing the percentage case, if only for
better bounce handling.

> I've included mailman-developers on this reply, since while this
> started on mm-users, it really ought to be discussed on the
> developers list...

Damned right.

> Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

How topical.

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw@kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows