[Mailman-Users] High load while sending a message.

[Ricardo Kustner]

Hi,

On 16-Aug-99 Fabricio Chalub wrote:
> I just configured mailman on my RH 6.0 box and set up a 60-people list.
> Now, whenever I send a mail to this list, my server load average goes to 20
> and even sometimes 40, instead of the normal 0.5 :)   My hard-disk goes
> crazy but the CPU usage remains low (0% - 10 %). 
> Why does this happen?  Is mailman running 60 copies of python at the same
> time?   I have 128 mb, and normally 3 mb on swap.  When I send a mail, my
> swap usage climbs up to 27-35 megabytes!

our web/mailserver (Pentium100, 64mb) raises up to even higher loads when
mail is send to all the list members (about 1,000... but the list is being
moderated so it can end up into sending 10 or more times 1,000 messages in a
short period) ... sometimes that would cause the running fastcgi scripts to
crash or even make the machine so slow it can hardly recover anymore without a
reboot...
the only way i could "workaround" this, is telling exim to queue the
incoming messages when the load average exceeds about 10 ... since i changed
this, our server isn't crashing anymore...

Ricardo.
--