[Mailman-Users] Call for suggestions

[alex wetmore]

On Tue, 8 May 2001, Ashley M. Kirchner wrote:
>     Load balancing.  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.

Most of the pain is in sending the messages.  For every message
recieved you are probably sending 500-1000 outbound messages (assuming
reasonably popular lists).

Why not just build multiple MTAs and round robin between them.  I'm
not sure if Mailman looks up the MX record for the SMTPHOST, but if
not it wouldn't be hard to change the code to randomly select between
multiple SMTPHOSTs.  If you have the budget you could just throw the
MTAs behind something like a Cisco LocalDirector which handles the
round robinning for you.

How big do you think your lists will be?  A single box with a single
disk should be able to handle 1 million + outgoing messages a day with
few problems.

alex