[Mailman-Users] performance/usage guidelines for Mailman

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2001 12:12:46 -0500 
Jim Saville <jsaville at ksconline.com> wrote:

> I am working with an organization which wants to run 5-20 lists
> with most lists running about 2000 subscribers.  

An interesting statistic, which you miss, is the number of posts per
day to a given list (of a given number of subscribers).  This
dictates what your mail loads will be.

> I am planning on using a Pentium 133 with 228Mb RAM and a 4Gb hd
> running RH6.2 Linux, Sendmail 8.9.3, and Mailman 2.0.  

While I'll grumble (I have to) about the selection of sendmail (I'd
advocate Postfix od Exim instead), and you'll need to be careful to
update and secure your Linux installation (RH 6.2 has a number of
well known holes), yes, this will work fine for (fairly large thumb
sucking sound) up to in the neighorhood of: 20 lists each with an
average of 2,000 members, each receiving an average of 100 posts a
day (2K inbound, 4M boutound, assuming 33% collapsing due to
duplicate domains, 2.6M outbound) give or take 15%, and assuming
excellent network connectivity, no real DNS troubles, (you'll want
to run a local DNS cache -- I like DJBdns), a better choice of MTA,
good tuning in general, etc.

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--