[Mailman-Developers] First big Mailing

[Marc Perkel]

I'm doing my first big mailing with Mailman/Exim to deliver effector for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation. The list is about 20,000 names.

Anyhow - started out moving right along, maybe too well - saturated the T1
pretty quick and the system slowed down. But the email logs were really going
fast. This went on for about 45 minutes.

During this time I saw a number of errors. Messages indicating the I had too
many files open (running tail on the exim logs). A few messages that looked
like something couldn't open something.db or something like that.

Then .....

The delivery slowed down as it it were done. System load dropped back to low
normal levels. This lasted a while - then things started back up again really
delivering messages. These deliveries come in spurts.

Anyhow - even though Exim is delivering other email. Messages sent to mailman
are getting "stuck". It's as if nothing in mailman is working. I see messages
being sent to mailman. But mailman isn't responding. I don't know if something
is holding these messages and this is waiting in some queue - or if Mailman
has crashed and is eating messages - or someing is corrupt or locked or
overloaded or what.

Anyhow - I'd like some general feedback on what might be happening. The
newsletter contains an important story about Norway inditing Jon Johansen
criminally. He's the guy who wrote the DVD code.

Anyhow - the future of the planet is at stake here - so I'd like to know this
is going to work and what I need to do to fine tune the system.

Marc Perkel
/root
EFF