[Mailman-Users] Phantom moderation pending requests & heldmsg files

[Chris Waltham]

Hi Mark,

Just to re-visit this...

On Apr 8, 2008, at 1:24 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> Chris Waltham wrote:
>>
>> With the exception of 3-4 lists (out of 800+), I let the "make  
>> update"
>> command run so I presume that actually upgraded the lists. I think I
>> might just delete the holdmsg files en masse, I can't see why
>> (organizationally) I should need to keep them.
>
>
> When you delete these files, it is better to use bin/discard as
> discussed in
> <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.074.htp>
> rather than just rm. This is because bin/discard actually removes the
> held message from the requests.pck file (see below). However, if the
> heldmsg-* file is an orphan, it won't be removed by bin/discard, so
> you need to run bin/discard first and then rm any files left.
>
> The problem with just removing the heldmsg-* file is if there are a
> large number of held messages for a single list, the admindb CGI can
> time out trying to create the held messages page, and just removing
> the heldmsg-* files without also removing the request.pck entries
> won't cure this time out.

I looked at my heldmsg files (all 40,000 of them :-)) and there are a  
number patterns. Most heldmsg files are from a handful of lists (let's  
call them baseball and football). If I do a dumpdb of the hockey  
list's pending.pck file, this is the output:

[mailman at list ~/bin]$ ./dumpdb ../lists/hockey/pending.pck
[----- start pickle file -----]
<----- start object 1 ----->
{   '6183e43cf99b4a6850537d2a4837b26886bade2a': ('H', 5145),
     'd22c46a0b5c704ec8be5c63a791e53adc23dc7fc': ('H', 5146),
     'df7eae0e0a275c43b9c4bfb8d5f037df578e6cc2': ('H', 5147),

Now, the first line ends with the value "5145". Here is what I can  
find on the filesystem:

[mailman at list ~/data]$ ls -al heldmsg-hockey* | grep 5145
-rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   3395 May  4 12:54 heldmsg- 
hockey-5145.pck

I rinsed & repeated that process with the other two entries in the  
pending.pck file, i.e. 5146 and 5147. For both of those two, I can  
find heldmsg-hockey-NNNN.pck (where NNNN equals the ID above).  
However, I still have an awful lot of heldmsg-hockey files that  
are .txt files, not .pck files:

[mailman at list ~/data]$ ls -al heldmsg-hockey*.txt | wc -l
3610

[mailman at list ~/data]$ ls -alt heldmsg-hockey*.txt | head
-rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   2210 Mar 13 08:42 heldmsg- 
hockey-4920.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   3250 Mar 13 08:14 heldmsg- 
hockey-4919.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   3646 Mar 13 01:18 heldmsg- 
hockey-4918.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   2505 Mar 12 03:50 heldmsg- 
hockey-4917.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   2377 Mar 12 03:50 heldmsg- 
hockey-4916.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   2815 Mar 11 14:38 heldmsg- 
hockey-4915.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   2354 Mar 10 12:02 heldmsg- 
hockey-4914.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   2591 Mar 10 11:28 heldmsg- 
hockey-4913.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   2227 Mar 10 11:19 heldmsg- 
hockey-4912.txt
-rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   2551 Mar 10 11:19 heldmsg- 
hockey-4911.txt

I think March 10 is around the time that I went from Mailman 2.0.12 to  
2.1.9. Now my question is this: does Mailman 2.1.9 reference .txt  
files for heldmessages, or are we only using .pck files now?

Thanks!


Chris