[Mailman-Developers] Multi-slice qrunners to be fixed for 2.1.6? (Re: SF Patch 1008983)

[Dallas Bethune]

On Oct 21, 2004, at 4:37 PM, Tokio Kikuchi wrote:

> Brian Greenberg wrote:
>
>> It should have a fairly high priority, as it will
>> result in any qrunner class with multiple slices failing completely in
>> a short amount of time (hours to a few days, depending on the amount
>> of traffic and number of slices).
>
> I really don't understand why the multiple feature is needed for mail
> delivery as multi-threading may be handled by MTA. It was left there
> because I am not in a position to test or qualify your patch
> immediately. If there is anyone who can backup this patch, I will be
> ready to merge in CVS.

The MTA cannot perform multithreading between multiple lists.  For 
instance, if there is one list with 10,000 subscribers no other 
deliveries can be made while the emails to those 10,000 people are 
being transferred to the MTA.  In some cases that may delay all other 
list delivery by several minutes and if that happens many times a day 
it can become problematic to end users.  Having multiple outgoing 
qrunners allows other list mail to be delivered simultaneously.

I have also seen the bug this patch addresses happen.  I saw one of the 
outgoing qrunner processes die within about 15 minutes of restarting 
mailman to have 4 of them.  They continued to die (and be restarted by 
the master) for the next several hours.  Once I applied the patch, the 
errors stopped.

I have not done any sort of extensive testing, but it has been working 
as expected for the past 3 days with the 3000 or so lists we have 
running on the machine.

	Dallas