[Mailman-Users] Call for suggestions

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 5/8/01 4:01 PM, "Ashley M. Kirchner" <ashley at pcraft.com> wrote:

>> Before we start building this beast -- why?
> 
>   Load balancing.

I figured, but I wanted to make sure.

> I prefer having one server running mailman and having all
> the lists on it, however this means that machine will also get hit pretty hard
> when several lists get to receive/send messages.  Having a cluster of machine
> that can handle incoming/outgoing msgs would solve this problem.

Okay, stupid question -- how big is this server you're building? How many
lists? How big? Do you NEED this?

> (I know for > a
> fact that (big ass) services like Yahoo do this.

And services like yahoo have programmers on staff to write this stuff, and
admins on staff to manage it, and budgets for the hardware, and...

> If you do a 'nslookup
> mx1.mail.yahoo.com', you'll get a series of servers returned.

Yes, however, I think you're looking at this sideways. MX records are for
incoming relays. That doesn't mean the list servers are on those machines;
in fact, I'll guarantee they're not. Those are simply relay machines who's
job it is to handle incoming mail, and then figure out what server gets it
and forward it. 

>  Somehow,
> somewhere, they all should tie back in to one DB somewhere, and I'm only
> assuming it's done through NFS.  But, as you pointed out....

Maybe, maybe not. And it's very likely NOT NFS -- a place like yahoo has
likely written a custom server system, and the back end is an SQL database
of some sort, perhaps a big-ass replicated one (like the one I'm currently
designing, actually...). What they are doing is a lot different than what
mailman does, and the back-end infrastructure is significantly different.

>> Trying to keep the subscriber databases in sync across machines is going to
>> be problematic.
> 
>   ...yes, I suppose that would be problematic.

To put it mildly.

If you need something the size of Yahoogroups, then you shouldn't be using
Mailman. I'm not. You could potentially distribute mailman if you wanted; I
can think of two ways of doing it off the top of my head fairly safely. But
before you do that, I think you really need to decide if that's what you
really need. I tend to think Mailman on decent hardware will go further than
you probably think it will.

How big are these lists? How many messages a day? How many total e-mails are
you thinking to send out a day? What's the hardware? What's the network and
the pipe?