[Mailman-Users] Pay per list?

[bronto]

J C;

Thanks for the detailed answer.  Read on:


>Please see the FAQ:
>
>   http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py
>
>Read it well and carefully.  Follow ALL the instructions.  Loosely:

Will do.  Thanks.

>  Buy some RAM.  Stuff your box full of it.  Get up to the couple Gig+
>   range if you can (I don't know Macs well to know how easy that is).
>   Don't even attempt this without at least 512Meg (1Gig will be much
>   better).

It's already maxed out at 768 mb.  But another off list suggestion 
was that I would want to get a dedicated box for this anyway, since 
no matter how fast I got it to go, it would still take a while and 
would block other activities in the meantime.

>   Get a new disk for /var/spool/postfix and another separate disk for
>   /var/log. If you have the opportunity, make the spool disk faster.  At
>   this point don't worry about IDE vs SCSI.

Very interesting suggestion, and disks are sooo cheap now.

>   If you can smarthost all outbound traffic to a different system from
>   your Mailman system.  Set it up similarly as above/below (distinct
>   spindle for spool and log, postfix config etc).  This simple step
>   would make handling this sort of load almost easy.  If you can't do
>   this, check with your ISP and see if they'd be willing to smarthost
>   for you.  Many will.

"smarthost" is a new term for me.  I'll look it up.

>Go straight to Mailman v2.1.  Don't bother with 2.0.

Already there.

>   As a comparable under Postfix on a dual PII-333 with 512Meg RAM
>   sitting on a couple T3s and a T1 I can sustain 1,400 deliveries a
>   minute.  You should be comfortably able to sustain at least half that
>   given that you've a slightly less muscled box and your outbound
>   bandwidth situation is likely skinnier.

As this is not delivering time sensitive information, these 
expectations are encouraging.

>   Given a reasonable distribution of slow MX'es (which is a silly
>   meaningless unrelative thing to say, but hey) that would mean that
>   you'd drain the majority of the queue down to the slow MXes in about
>   an hour (accounting for IO and spool contention).  If you want to use
>   your system for anything else during that time (expect system loads in
>   the 20 - 30 range for the majority of that time) you can reduce the
>   number of queue runners or throw in some bandwidth profiling, but note
>   that that will extend drain time non-linearly.

That's a good hint.  If this goes through, I might use this as a 
dedicated list server and try to recruit other list clients and give 
them specific time slots for sending messages to keep them spaced 
apart.  Or maybe it will be a dedicated mail server, but require them 
to send the messages late at night.

>Be prepared for a fairly extensive period of fiddling getting this
>really happy.  You're not up in the range where things get really
>sensitive, but you're getting there. Some care and discretion will be
>required.

Thanks again for your excellent suggestions.

Rob