[Mailman-Users] Mailman + giant lists + the infinite weight of the cosmos

[Cabel Sasser]

> 	Cool!  That may be the largest Mailman-hosted currently operating 
> single mailing list, at least the largest we've heard of so far.  I 
> would imagine that lists.apple.com probably does more traffic on a 
> daily basis, but so far as I know, it doesn't have any individual 
> lists that are anywhere near that large.

Holy smokes! I had no idea our list was that large. I guess it's an 
honor?! :)

I'd imagine Apple's lists are much, much larger...

I don't even want to talk about the pain I had to go through managing 
the mailing lists before I switched to Mailman (at the suggestion of a 
user!). It's been a real lifesaver and I'm a true believer.

> 	And from the company that created Audion, Unison, CandyBar, Stattoo, 
> the amazingly funny "USA vs. Japan Food" page, and so much more.  
> Very, very cool.

Thanks for the really kind words! Transmit 3 is also very shortly on 
its way, hence this question! :)

> 	Once you get to this kind of size, the web administration tools start 
> to fail.  To make things work, I imagine you're going to have to go to 
> command-line administration techniques.

Well, I actually do use the command-line for pretty much everything 
now. Sadly, even that has slowed down considerably: for example, adding 
a new member using "add_members -r -" just took 22 seconds. (Load is 
low right now.)

Similarly, removing that test user using "remove_members" just took 26 
seconds.

I've seen it be anywhere from 15 seconds to 60 seconds. Again, 
normally, this isn't a problem, until we send a mailing and the bounces 
start rolling in, requiring many many removes, and the system just 
pretty much buckles.

>  It shouldn't be too hard to use the command-line tool list_members to 
> get a list of your subscribers to the list, and then to split that up 
> unto multiple smaller chunks.
>
> 	It will take a bit more work to copy out all their preferences 
> settings so that you can replicate those on the new sub-list.

OK, this is what I was expecting. And when I send the mailing, I guess 
I'll send it to one list, wait for that to finish, then send it to the 
next list, etc.?

One question I just posed to Carl via e-mail is in regards to Python 
2.3 using this new "db package" for the pickles. I'll repost it here 
for the sake of the archives.

Mac OS X 10.3.7 seems to use Python 2.3 by default. The new db package 
sounds very promising. Will my Python pickles automatically use this 
new "db package" without requiring any work on my part? If the pickles 
were created with a previous version of Python (back in Mac OS X 10.2 
days), do I need to go through any process to "upgrade" them?

Thanks again so much for the help!

Best,
Cabel
Panic