[Mailman-Users] Mailman possible overloading Postfix

Johann MacDonagh johann at macdonaghs.com
Sat Mar 17 01:42:12 CET 2007


I'm setting up my Mailing list on a VPS (virtual private server) I have. 
It's set to have about 128MB of RAM. I'm running a simple Fedora Core 5 
server. I've got Postfix / QRunner / Apache 2 running on it.

I imported a mailing list that has about 80 subscribers. I attempted to 
post a message to all of them and this is what I got in my mail log.

Mar 16 19:23:05 myhost postfix/master[23796]: warning: process 
/usr/libexec/postfix/bounce pid 3190 exit status 127
Mar 16 19:23:05 myhost postfix/master[23796]: warning: 
/usr/libexec/postfix/bounce: bad command startup -- throttling

I used to get a lot of these throttling messages (especially when I held 
3 or 4 messages in the mailman moderation queue and accepted them all at 
once. Since then I've attempted to slow down the speed at which it 
sends. Here's my postfix main.cf:

smtpd_banner = $myhostname ESMTP $mail_name

myhostname = mail.mydomain.org
mydestination = mail.mydomain.org, localhost, localhost.localdomain

mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8
mailbox_size_limit = 0
recipient_delimiter = +
inet_interfaces = all


relay_domains = lists.mydomain.org

canonical_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/canonical

transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport

smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, 
permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_unauth_destination, 
reject_unauth_pipelining
smtpd_data_restrictions = reject_unauth_pipelining

default_process_limit = 20

mailman_destination_recipient_limit = 1



And the important parts of my mm_cfg:

DEFAULT_URL_HOST   = 'lists.mydomain.org'
DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'lists.mydomain.org'

DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN = 'http://%s/'
PRIVATE_ARCHIVE_URL = '/mailman/private'
IMAGE_LOGOS         = '/icons/'

PUBLIC_ARCHIVE_URL = 'http://%(hostname)s/archive/%(listname)s/'

MTA = None

SMTP_MAX_RCPT = 20

# Because we've overriden the virtual hosts above add_virtualhost
# MUST be called after they have been defined.

add_virtualhost(DEFAULT_URL_HOST, DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST)


This seemed to fix it somewhat. I only got one error (the one I posted 
above) when sending one message.

Here's the final strange thing. After a message gets delivered to all 
subscribers, the mailman site will be unavailable. Sometimes it says:

"Oops, we've hit a bug in Mailman <undetermined version>".

and sometimes it says something along the lines of:

"Oops, we've hit a bug. .... The issue was very low level and a trace 
probably wouldn't help you."

None of the mailman logs show anything regarding this. It seems like the 
server doesn't have enough resources to display the mailman page (and 
perhaps even fails to update the log because of a lack of resources).

Does anyone have any experience running Mailman on a low end server? I 
can double the specs on this VPS for an extra $10 a month. I'll probably 
test that out and see how well it works.

Thanks,

Johann MacDonagh


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