[Mailman-Users] mailman is very slow...

[Mark Sapiro]

Troy Campbell wrote:

>For some reason our Mailman installation has gotten very slow.  One
>email distro took about 17 hours according to the user.   There is data
>flow as I can see by running the "mmdsr" stat script.  I googled and
>found something about qfiles can grow too large  but don't have any in
>my /var/lib/mailman directory.  I also went through a checklist I found
>online to tell if Mailman was hung and didn't see anything that this
>matched.
>
>The version of Mailman we are running is:
>
>mailman-2.1.9-4.el5  on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2
>(Tikanga).  


In RedHat, queues are in var/spool/mailman/. See the FAQ at
<http://wiki.list.org/x/KYCB>.


>Also bouncing mailman "appears" to make it run faster for a short while
>when looking at the maillog but I could be imaging things.


What does this (bouncing mailman) mean?


>I saw some of these errors from the mmdsr script:
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/virgin/1285535430.9693439+c15f2ea8cc51d4a0768ac9501e2
>cb46604bca247.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/in/1285358418.500119+88f4ebd1cd94a4b61b2422cf92d196b8
>e30b7c3d.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/in/1285358403.1655681+02fde9a4b5b52413bbf130b5591edc8
>55b3697b4.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/archive/1285357860.2852571+261eec64e3bbc89300e941420b
>db7bbbbc63024d.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/archive/1285357858.8509741+1978e52ebf4961eae874fd3298
>3473ec5b928a92.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/archive/1285357851.4396069+6c0356985765abcdb511eaf973
>a1a08af2f411eb.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/archive/1285357851.2718539+65d7680e2649c275aff5be0bf4
>d447732180726a.bak
>
> 
>
> 
>
>It appears those files do not exist now.  The Hourly summary of Posts,
>Post count by List,  and Post Count by Sender is in the low thousands or
>hundreds.  I bounced Mailman multiple times as well as bouncing postfix
>thinking the system was hung before investigating the stats.  I'm going
>to go home now as I've been fighting this all day but will check back
>later.


Do you have multiple copies of the qrunners running? That could account
for the errors you see. See the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/_4A9>.

Is Mailman's out/ queue backlogged? The symptom of this is several to
many files in (in your case) /var/spool/mailman/out/ and entries in
Mailman's smtp log with time stamps equal to the time stamp of the
prior entry + the processing time for this entry.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan