[Mailman-Users] Slow Performance on semi-large lists

[Neil Cooler]

Hi everyone,

I am running mailman 2.0 beta-2 on a Dual PII 400 linux box with 384
megs of ram.
We have around 7 lists, all of which run at approximately different
times, and most of which are at 3,000 subscribers or less, except one
which has over 8,000.

It often takes 2 or 3 hours for the mailings to go out (even the smaller
ones).  I would like to increase performance, but i'm not really too
sure what to do.  I am running sendmail 8.9.3 (as included in RH 6.2).
Running a different MTA is not really much of an option (although not
completely out of the question), as noone here is trained in anything
except Sendmail, and especially not trained in moving a production
server over to a different MTA while it is in use.  I will be upgrading
to 2.0 final tomorrow, and I imagine that *might* help out a little.

I found a little nugget of joy on the mailman FAQ about disabling
synchronous DNS for messages originating from localhost, but have not
been able to figure out how to do that in Sendmail (its not in the
README.sendmail).  Could someone explain this to me, or point me in the
right direction?

Perhaps there is something else I am missing at the MTA level?  Maybe I
should run qrunner more often/less often than every thirty
minutes?  Anything else?

Thanks Much for all of your help.  If i recieve enough information, I
would be happy to write some documentation on increasing mailman
performance under this configuration (which is likely the most popular).

Neil Cooler
Unix Admin,
Nando Media
http://www.nandotimes.com 
http://www.nandomedia.com