[Mailman-Users] Serious Performance issue

[Lindsay Haisley]

Thus spake Gadi Evron on Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 10:38:48AM CDT
> On Tue, 17 Oct 2006, Peter Kofod wrote:
> > Hi Everyone:
> > 
> > I am new to this list having just implemented mailman for an
> > announce-list we host.  In short, the performance is horrible.  The list
> > has approx 40,000 subscribers and the avg message going out is about 40K
> > (some embedded imagery).  I know we can do better with lazy html etc.,
> > but the system has become unresponsive.
> 
> Generally, mailman does not really cope with *very* large lists too
> well. It is still my system of choice.

I would try to profile the problem, chunk it down into components and see where 
it's taking the most time.  My guess is that it's not a Mailman problem, but an 
MTA problem.  "Unresponsive" generally means that your load average has gone 
way up, which is easy to check using top, and you can also see which processes 
are eating CPU cycles.  The FAQs which Patrick cited look quite helpful, but 
even so, IMHO, 40K subscribers is a *very* large list.  A single 40K message to 
the list ends up pushing better than a gigabyte of data through your mail 
server.  Load balancing the job across several servers might be appropriate.

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