[Mailman-Developers] Mailman queue design problem?

[Carson Gaspar]

As I understand it, mailman operates by receiving mail to one of 3 
addresses (list, list-request, list-admin), flagging the message as a post, 
request, or bounce/admin message, and adding it to qfiles. qrunner then 
processes qfiles and handles everything.

This doesn't work for large lists. It has 2 major problems:

- large numbers of bounces prevent list mail and list requests from being 
processed
- a flat directory structure is a performance nightmare on non-btree dir 
filesystems

To be specific, the firewalls mailing list had accumulated over 20,000 
bounces in qfiles, which was preventing anything from getting done, and 
making the machine _very_ unhappy.

So I recommend a quick fix of splitting the queue into 3 parts, and a 
medium term fix of adopting one of the tiered directory structures 
(postfix, new sendmail, etc.).

-- 
Carson Gaspar - carson@taltos.org
Queen trapped in a butch body