[Mailman-Users] (no subject)

[Herman Knief]

Well, I know for a fact (thanks to /var/log/messages) that I ran out of file
descriptors with Mailman and Sendmail using a stock kernel.  And from the
mods listed on the original message, you'll note the "FD_SETSIZE" value
which is coming straight out of 2.2 source.  Now, the FD limitation may have
been caused by python, generating the message queue, but, saying that
sendmail only opens one socket per entry in the queue is a bit misleading
don't you think.  Realize that sendmail may spawn n number of children
(defined in sendmail.cf.) in processing mail, and if each child takes some
number of entries in the queue, you could use quite a few file descriptors.
All I know is that the kernel mods fixed my initial problems, and then
switching to postfix dramatically improved performance from a load
perspective.

 - Herman

-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Tomblin [mailto:ptomblin at xcski.com]
Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2000 10:07 AM
To: mailman-users at python.org
Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] (no subject)


Quoting Herman Knief (hknief at auctionwatch.com):
>> Just a question,  I am running mailman on a redhat 6.1 box with sendmail.
>> The distribution list which we post to has about 50,000 people on it and
is
>> getting killed with our weekly mailings. I have heard that FREEBSD with
>> postfix is more efficient any suggestions?

> One problem that you may be running into is file descriptors.  If you're
> running a stock RedHat kernel, you run out of fd's at some ridiculously
low
> number (I think 1024).  There are some published docs on increasing the

I think it's actually 4096 on 2.2 kernels.  However, I don't think this is a
problem with sendmail.  Sendmail essentially only opens one socket at a time
for each entry in the mailq.  Postfix makes simultaneous connections, which
may mean that you'll need to increase the maximum number of files with
postfix
even if you don't for sendmail.


-- 
Paul Tomblin <ptomblin at xcski.com>, not speaking for anybody
God does not play dice with the Universe.    -- Albert Einstein.

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