[Mailman-Users] BIG discard problem

[Robert Echlin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robert Echlin" <rechlin at ca.stilo.com>
To: "David Relson" <relson at osagesoftware.com>
Cc: <mailman-users at python.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2004 1:38 PM
Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] BIG discard problem
> For my next try, I have set the timeout to 1500 seconds, instead of 300,
in
> httpd.conf and restarted apache. Looking at top, I expect that I read it
> incorrectly (see above) when I thought it had run for 14.6 minutes,
because
> it is hovering around 16% of memory, and the timeout in apache would have
> limited it to 300 seconds (4.5 minutes of CPU time at 90%).

Results: it timed out again.
But the memory had kept fluctuating, so I figured it was still working when
it died.
So I upped the timeout again, restarted apache, and tried to load the page
again...

And it came up almost immediately!!!
With only one (1) pending request!!!
So it must have been deleting items from it's records when it found the
heldmsg files were missing, and hadn't got back to the web browser before
the time out.

Anyway, the secret sequence for getting rid of 10914 or more messages in
your pending requests queue seems to be:
- delete mailman/data/heldmsg-yourlistname-*.pck
  - thanks Eric Schmitz
  - you may not be able to delete them all at once
    - I used
      rm -f heldmsg-listname-01*.pck
      rm -f heldmsg-listname-02*.pck
      etc up to 15*
    - there are other ways including using xargs
- then you set your timeout real high in Apache and open the "tend to
pending moderator requests" link in your web browser
- and wait 25 minutes (1GHZ Celeron CPU under Linux 2.4 kernel).
- and try again

If I were doing this again, I would look at the size and dates of other
files belonging to my list after each iteration of trying the link, as it
must have a list of requests some place. $MAILMAN_HOME/lists/<my
list>/request.pck was over 5M when I started this process. Now it is 20
bytes. That's indicative of something. Also, I looked at its contents at one
time and I think they included the subjects of the messages. But I don't
know what would happen if I blew that file away, at the same time as blowing
away the heldmsg files. That's a useful item to test some time.

Thanks guys,

Robert