[Mailman-Users] How to decrease high loads

[Sarah K. Miller]

> > We're running Mailman on a Sun Sparc Station 5, with 256 megs of
> > RAM and a 9.2 Gig hard drive. We've got about 80 lists, with the
> > busiest one producing approx 30 messages a day. We have a lot of
> > people signing up for lists right now though, creating a lot of
> > traffic. We are seeing load averages in excess of 25 when multiple
> > sign-ups are being processed. Is there anyway to configure mailman
> > to decrease the load average?  And yes, we're working on getting a
> > better machine, but we have to limp by with what we have for now .
>
> While you don't provide the details in this area, I'd suspect that
> your richest vein for handling this would likely be at the MTA.
>
> Note: Depending on the size of your membership lists, the system you
> discuss is more than adequate for handling the better part of a
> million messages a day without undue strain.  Mailing lists are not
> terribly resource intensive, not at the CPU level.  What they
> consume are IO (disk and network) and RAM -- both of which appear
> reasonable (tho you don't comment on your connectivity).

Our MTA is sendmail. What we're seeing is multiple python processes
spawning, which seem to eat huge amounts of resources. Is this normal?