[Mailman-Users] reboot servers

[Steff Watkins]

> The servers are all vps'es with 256 ram..

I'm assuming you meant 256 Megs RAM.. to which I say "Luxury!!!!" :)

> and the lists are as big as 33,000 
> subscribers per list, 3 lists per vps.. it's one big mailing 
> list for a TV  station and newspaper.. only one message (newsletter)
is sent 
> out every day to the subscribers.. but setting:

..and a well-behaved SMTP daemon will just queue up the emails and file
them out onto the internets as and when it sees a gap in the traffic.

Are you just using these servers for mailing purposes, or have you got
all the extra gubbins like samba daemons, webservers, named/bind/dns
servers, enterprise management suites, X11 servers and the like running
on there as well?

Of course the other problem might be that your system is not interfacing
very well with the upstream mailer. How reliable/how quickly does a
standard non-list email take to send from that system to... somewhere
else?

I'd really look at pruning down the excess cruft in the runspace of
those servers, getting rid of all the unnecessary processes that seem to
get foisted onto the box when the install CD does its job. If you think
that memory may be a problem then up the size of your swap/virtual
memory. Disk-space is cheap right now and if you're just stacking a load
of processes then having a useful lump of swap can come in very handy.

"mailq shows several errors like: too many open files"

Ahhh! The old 'not enough open file descriptors to do a decent job'
problem. You haven't said what O/S you're using so I couldn't really
give you a definite on this one but have a look on google (other search
engines are available!) for how to increase the number of open file
descriptors (or handles) in your O/S. It'll usually involve sticking a
line or two into the /etc/system file and rebooting.

It sounds a bit like your O/S hasn't been tuned to handle the number of
processes it has running so either kill off some of the
excess/unwanted/unneeded daemon processes, twiddle arund with the
etc/system file.. And good luck! :)

Regards,
Steff

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