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

[Troy Campbell]

Thanks Mark for the reply... what I meant by "bouncing" was
"restarting"...sorry for the slang.  The emails I sent out to the list
but it took about 3 hours.  There is nothing in the "out" directory
right now but there are 187 ".pck" files in the "in" directory if that
means anything and 7624 ".pck" files in the "archive" directory.

I restarted mailman carefully to verify that all processes stopped.

I'm not exactly sure what to look for in the smtp log, which is
/var/log/maillog in my case.

Thanks again,
Troy

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Sapiro [mailto:mark at msapiro.net] 
Sent: Sunday, September 26, 2010 8:22 PM
To: Troy Campbell; mailman-users at python.org
Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman is very slow...

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+c15f2ea8cc51d4a0768ac9501e
2
>cb46604bca247.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/in/1285358418.500119+88f4ebd1cd94a4b61b2422cf92d196b
8
>e30b7c3d.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/in/1285358403.1655681+02fde9a4b5b52413bbf130b5591edc
8
>55b3697b4.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/archive/1285357860.2852571+261eec64e3bbc89300e941420
b
>db7bbbbc63024d.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/archive/1285357858.8509741+1978e52ebf4961eae874fd329
8
>3473ec5b928a92.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/archive/1285357851.4396069+6c0356985765abcdb511eaf97
3
>a1a08af2f411eb.bak
>
>mailman.2010_09_26:      1 Failed to unlink backup file:
>/var/spool/mailman/archive/1285357851.2718539+65d7680e2649c275aff5be0bf
4
>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