[Mailman-Users] Mailman being -very- slow

[Josep L. Guallar-Esteve]

On Wednesday 21 May 2003 10:37 pm, Dan Wright US2002021042 wrote:
> Okay, I'm not the server admin.. I just mainly manage the lists and the
> list owners..
>
> However, Mailman is being VERY slow. 2 hour turn around time. I know
> that we've got some spikes in python that go up to 70-80% CPU usage.
> Other than that, resources are mostly free.
>
> Message are normally archived right away, but they are not sent out.
> However, all email forwarders work normally.
>
> Any ideas where to look?


Hi,

I had similar problems: Python was eating all my CPU (90%), using up tons of 
RAM and having a delivery time of +5 minutes, on a server with a lightly used 
mailman (not many users, not many lists...).

I discovered that the problem was the messages size. There was about 100 
messages sent to mailman in few seconds, each of them around 300 KB 
(Kilobytes) of size.

Mailman parses the messages with Python, and Python was using up around 300 MB 
(yes, megabytes) for message, and took 6 minutes of CPU time to parse each 
single message.

This is on a P-III-Xeon-550 with 1.3 GB (GigaBytes) of RAM, with a usual load 
of 0.2.

So check the message size on the emails sent with mailman. You'll be 
surprised.

Jon Carnes recommended me to try, maybe, to use a RAMDISK for certain 
activities (as RAM is cheap).

Jon: What was the directory to load as a RAMDISK?


Hope this helps.


Regards,
Josep
-- 
Josep L. Guallar-Esteve		Eastern Radiologists, Inc.
Systems and Network Administration  http://www.easternrad.com