[Mailman-Users] Call for suggestions

[Ashley M. Kirchner]

Chuq Von Rospach wrote:

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

    Generally, two to six at the most.  If I don't clean out the queue because of
nasty remote servers not working properly, it can go into a day or two.  That's
generally when I'll get a phone call because someone hasn't seen their msg gone
through yet.


> 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...

    I'm willing to wait and try, see how much it'll help.


> -- 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.

    I already have to do this.  I have sendmail configured so that it holds
something in queue for up to 24 hours (instead of the default 5 days).  Mailman has
been set to shut off delivery after 2 failures (I forgot what the default was).
However, even with these two in place, with 20 messages coming in every hour, that
starts to clog the queue pretty darned fast.


> 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...

    These are all things I'm willing to entertain.  You're right, there may be
things that I can do now that will help.  When I changed DNS resolution from a
remote DNS server to localhost, that helped a great deal.  When I told sendmail to
start using .hoststat, that helped as well (it didn't need to try to resolve every
time anymore).

    Has anyone written an administrator's guide to optimizing mailman?

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