[Mailman-Users] Administrative actions extremely slow

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Brian J Mingus writes:

 > I am moderating a list with 4200 members. Clicking on any link is extremely
 > slow. I have asked that our server be upgraded, but I was told that the
 > problem is with the mailman software. They claim that every time I try to
 > perform any action mailman scans through every user. I have no ability to
 > verify the validity of this claim as I don't have access to the
 > server.

It probably does, but 4200 is by no means a large number of things to
scan, unless access to the user database is quite slow.  If your host
is using a Mailman modified to access a database, that could slow
things down quite a bit depending on how that's set up.  Seems very
implausible to me, but that's my best guess at why the number of
members could slow things down.

Let me offer my experience.  My largest list had a few more than 900
members, and the only time I recall the moderation pages being slow
was one instance where my host broke his incoming spam filters and in
48 hours I built up a moderation queue of over 1500 messages, 99.44%
pure spam.  I never did get a response; the network would time out and
the browser gave up.

For normal moderation queues of 0 to maybe 20 messages, the time to
complete a transaction would be anywhere from "blink and you'll miss
it" to 5 seconds, depending on network conditions as far as I know.

That's a 900 member list.  I don't see why anything other than a
linear scan would be involved, so it seems to me that you "should" be
getting response times in the 1 second range most of the time,
especially if you're working on a local area network.

 > Please let me know if you can think of a fix or troubleshooting steps for me
 > to recommend.

Everything I can think of requires shell access to the host.  I think
you're kind of dependent on your provider, but they want to point
fingers elsewhere.  "I feel your pain, brother." :-(