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

Brad Knowles brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Tue Feb 8 23:29:06 CET 2005


At 1:50 PM -0800 2005-02-08, Cabel Sasser wrote:

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

	It may well be the largest single Mailman-hosted mailing list 
that is currently in operation.  There are sites running larger 
servers, but what they've got is a different traffic mix.

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

	IIRC, the last time I heard, their largest single list was 
somewhere in the region of 15,000 users.  But then they host over a 
hundred lists, and many of those lists are both reasonably large and 
high traffic, which results in amazing quantities of mail being 
delivered every day.

>  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.?

	No, with an umbrella list, what you do is send the message to the 
parent, that is broken out into one copy for each of the sub-lists, 
and then each of the sub-lists can be processed in parallel.

	Umbrella lists are not a perfect solution -- they do have some 
issues.  But I think they may be a good idea for you to check out.

>  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?

	I'm not one hundred percent sure, but I would be very surprised 
if they did.  I think you may need to do a little bit of programming 
to change the pickle format, but I couldn't tell you what that would 
be.  I'll leave others to answer this question.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.



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