[Mailman-Users] Using Mailman for High Volume Subscription Mailings... and High Availability

[Brad Knowles]

At 1:09 PM -0500 2005-03-14, Forrest Aldrich wrote:

>  I wonder what resources (and perhaps fine-tuning) would be required to
>  get Mailman to accomodate these sorts of large tasks.

	See <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.015.htp>.

	Also search for "performance" within the FAQ Wizard.

>  Earlier, I posted a question about High Availability and received only
>  one response (thank you, though).  There has to be a way to scale Mailman
>  into a large infrastructure (?).   Given that Mailman is, in of itself,
>  an API, there must be some way to hook into the MTA (Postfix, in our case).

	In terms of doing high-availability, I think most people have 
been splitting the front-end web service from the back-end list 
processing, as well as splitting the MTA services onto separate 
machines.

	If you need the back-end Mailman-only stuff to also be highly 
available, you should be able to mostly do that with NFS, but this 
may run into some problems, and will certainly cost you in terms of 
performance.

>  I'd appreciate information from someone who has implemented something
>  this significant.

	Most of the information about large-scale mailing lists is 
already found in the FAQ entry mentioned above, or in the archives. 
There's a lot less information in the FAQ Wizard or in the archives 
with regards to high-availability configurations.

	I don't think anyone anywhere has publicly talked about doing 
both high-volume and high-availability, at least not with Mailman.

>  The outsourced company we used in the past had sophisticated queue
>  monitoring tools (php-based) as well as queue management (Postfix
>  used as the MTA).

	Postfix can be a really good MTA for mailing lists, at least for 
handling outbound e-mail.

	If you get into lots of message scanning and having to pass 
through multiple scanning systems (e.g., multiple anti-spam and 
anti-virus scanning systems), then I think sendmail would scale 
better (due to the milter interface), but sendmail would also take 
more work to configure, and more care and feeding to keep going once 
it's configured.

-- 
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.