[Mailman-Users] Call for suggestions

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On 5/8/01 4:55 PM, "Ashley M. Kirchner" <ashley at pcraft.com> wrote:

>   Something I don't have. :)  That's why I'm trying to go as light as I can,
> with
> currently (working) software.

Well, when you have more stuff, you have more complexity. Someone has to
build it and maintain it.

>   Right now, the single machine running lists is a 200Mhz RISC machine,
> hosting
> roughly 30 lists, each one with subscriber base between 1,500 to 5,000 (only
> about 5
> of those lists actually hit the 5,000 mark, the rest are all under 2,500).
> Each
> list is generating an average of 20 msgs per hour, most of them being between
> the
> hours of 6AM and 9PM.

And your average delay in delivery is -- how long?

>From what you're saying, you're delivering roughly 225-250 messages a day,
at an average of, say, 4000 subscribers. That's roughly 1,000,000 pieces of
email a day.

FWIW, my big mailman machine is a sun e250, and it's handling more than
triple that a day, with peak time delays of about 2 hours (except on really
bad days or when something goes weird...). I'm not allowed to give out
numbers, but it's running at capacity during peak hours, and doing a log
more than you're doing.

>   Yes I know, I should probably look into buying a faster machine, however I
> don't
> have that luxury (at the moment).  I do however have other machines at my
> disposal
> that I can use, providing I can tie them in this (main) one.

The real problem you're seeing is that Mailman 2.0 is singlethreaded. It
only does one thing at a time. Barry's fixing this for 2.1. If you can hold
on and deal with the delivery delays until then, you will almost guaranteed
find that the upgrade will save you the hassle of having ot add hardware and
build solutions. When's 2.1? When barry finishes it. But I can pretty much
guarantee 2.1 will magically make your hardware faster...

Now, before that -- I'll bet there are still things you can do to speed up
performance. For instance, I've found that over time, while Mailman has a
pretty good bounce-processing system, there are enough weirdie systems out
there that won't cooperate. Over time, this stuff clogs up your queues and
forces mailman to spend time dealgin with bounces -- going through the
bounce queues can clear up a significant amount of processing time, at very
little work. You just need to spend time watching the queues and logs and
clearing stuff out that gets in the way.

And -- what's your MTA? Sendmail? How are you configured? What's your batch
size? What are you doing for DNS resolution? I'll bet there are things you
can do to mailman to fix up stuff here, or to your delivery system, to speed
things up...