[Mailman-Users] Archive looping

[Joseph Brennan]

We have a list with a very large archive, over 137,000 messages in a month. 
It catches system alerts. This might just be a bad idea. Maybe we should 
archive by day. But it's been all right for many months up to now.

I'm looking for ideas on how to solve a problem with the archives.

Yesterday the archive got into a weird state that I could not break by a 
shutdown and fresh start. For each incoming message, it rewrites all of the 
old messages with one extra newline. This useless activity takes quite a 
while and has caused mail to accumulate in the in/ directory.

Inspection of a sample message in a backup from about 24 hours ago shows 
hundreds of newlines added to the message in that time. The newlines are 
always added at the same place, between this:---

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and this:---

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Below is a 'truss' (it's solaris!) showing the read and write for one 
message. It reads 8192 and 2187 bytes, and writes out the same file with 
8192 and 2188 bytes. (List name changed to 'listname')

open64("/mailman/archives/private/listname/2015-August/130332.html", 
O_RDONLY) = 9
fstat64(9, 0xFFBFEC40)				= 0
fstat64(9, 0xFFBFEC80)				= 0
fstat64(9, 0xFFBFEB28)				= 0
ioctl(9, TCGETA, 0xFFBFEC0C)			Err#25 ENOTTY
read(9, " < ! D O C T Y P E   H T".., 8192)	= 8192
read(9, "\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n".., 8192)	= 2187
llseek(9, 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFD8D, SEEK_CUR)		= 9752
close(9)					= 0
umask(02)					= 07
open64("/mailman/archives/private/listname/2015-August/130332.html", 
O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0666) = 9
fstat64(9, 0xFFBFEC40)				= 0
umask(07)					= 02
stat64("/opt/mailman-2.1.15/messages/en_US.ISO8859-1/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.mo", 
0xFFBFE908) Err#2 ENOENT
stat64("/opt/mailman-2.1.15/messages/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.mo", 
0xFFBFE908) Err#2 ENOENT
stat64("/opt/mailman-2.1.15/messages/en.ISO8859-1/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.mo", 
0xFFBFE908) Err#2 ENOENT
stat64("/opt/mailman-2.1.15/messages/en/LC_MESSAGES/mailman.mo", 
0xFFBFE908) Err#2 ENOENT
fstat64(9, 0xFFBFECC8)				= 0
fstat64(9, 0xFFBFEB70)				= 0
ioctl(9, TCGETA, 0xFFBFEC54)			Err#25 ENOTTY
write(9, " < ! D O C T Y P E   H T".., 8192)	= 8192
write(9, "\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n".., 2188)	= 2188
close(9)					= 0



Joseph Brennan
Columbia University Information Technology