At 8:11 PM -0700 2006-09-06, Jack Stone wrote:
> I'll have to check on the things you suggested, but just a quick
> response without more specifics, I've noticed it takes a long, long
> time for the announcement list to reach the sendmail queue -- and
> the "qfiles/out" is usually choked with queued messages for quite a
> while. It appears the discussion list has to wait in line..
In that case, it seems likely that your delay is in the Mailman queue
management process, and not within sendmail. In that case, I
recently did a slight cleanup on some good stuff that Nigel
Metheringham put into the FAQ Wizard for FAQ 6.6, and I'd recommend
you take a look at it.
You may also want to look into running multiple queue runners.
Within sendmail, this is not too difficult, but this is a pretty
advanced concept for Mailman. IIRC, Barry has had some things to say
about this in the archives of the mailman-users or mailman-developers
mailing lists, and I'd encourage you to search the archives.
> By past experience with majordomo, it would "cook" the big one-way
> announcement list for a couple hours, but still send out the
> discussion postings (plus regular user mail) immediately without delay
> -- and although the dam would burst into sendmail queue from the
> eventual fully-cooked (batched) announcements (10,000+), it would
> still pass all other requests to sendmail's queue.
The issue here is that Majordomo didn't have a separate queue
management process for handling mail as it was being processed
through the system. Instead, they would fork a separate Majordomo
process for each message that was posted, and then that process would
be responsible for handling everything to do with processing that
message, up to the point where everything was handed off to sendmail.
The Majordomo approach has good points and bad ones. One bad point
is that it requires a hell of a lot more memory because you can have
a large number of simultaneous processes in memory at any given time,
and each one of those processes could grow to gargantuan sizes for
even a moderately sized list. In addition, classic Majordomo didn't
do any chunking of the messages being sent, which causes all the
outgoing copies of a given incoming message to be single-threaded,
and a slow site in the middle of the list of recipients could cause
mail for all the following recipients to be greatly delayed.
Rob Kolstad and Strata Chalup both talked about tuning Majordomo and
sendmail for large mailing lists in their respective papers, which I
linked from FAQ 6.3. If you really want to know the deep internals
of how these things work (or sometimes don't work), I'd encourage you
to read those papers.
In the long run, the Majordomo approach is not very scalable. IMO,
Mailman is more scalable, but because it has it's own internal queue
processing system, it places different demands on the system and
requires different types of tuning for maximum performance.
I've tried to collect as much wisdom as I can in the various FAQ
entries which have the keyword "performance" in them, but the
internal tuning of Mailman for maximum performance is still a pretty
black art for most of us -- I can tune sendmail or postfix with the
best of them, but I'm way out of my depth when it comes to tuning
Mailman itself -- that's the kind of thing for which I'd have to turn
to Barry.
> I know this is not majordomo, just looking for anything I may have
> mis-configured that may cause this delay. Sendmail has always handled
> my loads with ease -- all mail lists, plus individual users.
I'm not convinced that there is anything Majordomo-specific that you
may have done to your server(s) that causes it/them to be less
suitable for use with Mailman, but then I don't know everything
you've done to your server(s).
I can tell you, with some confidence, that I know of some areas
within Mailman that I believe could be significant bottlenecks, and
may take a fair bit of work to resolve.
--
Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
Founding Individual Sponsor of LOPSA. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.
------------------------------------------------------
Mailman-Users mailing list
Mailman-Users@python.org
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users
Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py
Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/
Unsubscribe:
http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Security Policy:
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp
