[Mailman-Developers] sleep() after sending a chunk?

[Fil]

> > I'd really love to add somme sleep() function just after the
> > deliveryfunc() call, something that would set Mailman to sleep about
> > 1/10th of a second per recipient.
> 
> I just don't see the point of this.  You may have stopped a large list
> inject being so aggressive on CPU usage, but you have increased the
> lifetime of processes by a factor of 30 or so (on your figures), and so
> increased the memory pressure and likelihood of swapping etc due to
> processes being just as fat but lasting longer.

The process we're talking about is OutgoingRunner, which is always in
memory. I don't mind keeping the whole list in RAM -- I have 3 Gb, and the
list (and chunks) probably eat up something like twice the size of the
config.pck file, so about 44Mb. The only problem I see is if the list were
locked during all that time, but I don't think (from what I understand from
the code) that it is.

> Your users may notice the big lists getting much slower - and having
> deliveries smeared over a much longer period.

Well that's already the case as postfix (my MTA) has 150 K messages to
deliver, isn't it? But right now Mailman injects everything into postfix w/o
considering that it might explode the load and system hit. It's brutal, with
the load going to 25, and CPU to 70% (and I have a very nice machine, a
brand new quadri-processor thing :-] ).

> You may find you have made things less efficient by having 2 deliveries
> to a single list slowed down so that different messages to the same
> recipient can no longer be put in the same SMTP session (if your MTA
> does that).

I'm not sure postfix does that, no. And it's not really relevant in this
case, as I really only have ONE big list with ONE message to send (and alot
of small lists and normal emails to try to sneak through if possible).

>  For that matter can multiple deliveries be made against the
> same list at the same time?
> 
> Why not just run the cron jobs under nice instead?

What cron jobs? Sure I can renice the OutgoingRunner, but it won't change
much (except that it will get swapped first if something needs to get
swapped).

-- Fil