[Mailman-Users] number of mailing lists

[Christopher Petrilli]

Kory Wheatley [wheakory at isu.edu] wrote:
> Here is my question. I am going to install mailman on a Compaq 450MHZ
> 64mb   13gb hard drive with the platform being Red Hat Linux 6.0. I will
> be subscribing over a hundred and fifty  mailing lists in mailman, two
> lists will have at least 7,000 people subscribed in them and these lists
> are only used once a week. With all of the lists how big of a impact
> will this be on the system performance?  Will the server experience
> utilization problems? If there will be a problem would you give me some
> suggestions?

You've got plenty of CPU for mailman, I suspect... you're going to more
likely find your problems in the mail subsystem.  I would STRONGLY recommend
dumping Sendmail as fast as possible.  I use 'postfix' (http://www.postfix.org)
mostly because of its Author (who also wrote tcp_wrappers and SATAN),
and it is blindingly fast.  I have 4 mailing lists that are 1K+ people
and I've never seen it generate even the slightest load on the machine.

You should also look at disk I/O as a throttle point... a single
drive is going to only be able to handle a certain number of IO transactions
in a period of time, and archiving especially can kill that.  You might
want a seperate drive for your spool.

Chris
-- 
| Christopher Petrilli
| petrilli at amber.org