Re: very slow message propagation..
Re: very slow message propagation..
- Subject: Re: very slow message propagation..
- From: chuq von rospach <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 1 Jun 2001 09:42:46 -0700
On Friday, June 1, 2001, at 02:13 AM, John C. Randolph wrote:
Is anyone else noticing that messages to this list seem to propagate
*very* slowly?
Yes, at times. I'm working on it.
If the listserve were somewhat snappier, I'm sure there would be a lot
less redundant traffic.
(probably not, actually, since most people don't read ALL their mail
before responding to things. It'd cut some of it, but not all of it...)
Is this a general issue with GNU MailMan?
Yes and no.
The issue with lists.apple.com is a capacity one. This server is very
busy. Yesterday was about typical, with 559 messages posted to the lists
to a total of about 300,000 addresses.
There is a design limitation to Mailman 2.0 that limits how quickly it
can process requests. That will be fixed in Mailman 2.1, but the real
problem on lists is that sendmail is a bottleneck in accepting mail from
mailman.
I've been working on getting all this under control -- we have our good
days, and we have days like yesterday. I spent most of yesterday up to
my elbows in the mail queues trying to get it under control and figure
out WHY we have days like yesterday.
Could it perhaps be remedied by switching from sendmail to qmail for
the outgoing delivery/
It'll be a cold day in tucson before I'll use qmail, but one of the
things I'm actively working on is moving from sendmail to postfix. I've
got a bunch of upgrades and tweaks almost ready to install (they're off
cooking on my guinea pig machine, and I've got one technical glitch I
need to resolve before I inflict it on you folks). If things work out,
I'll do the first round of upgrades next week, and hopefully postfix
towards the end of next week or the week after, once I have a chance to
get it built, configured and tested.
Once we get to Mailman 2.1 (sometime mid- to late- summer, I hope, it's
in alpha) and I get postfix installed, we'll have plenty of capacity.
right now, we're running somewhere between 95% and 105% of what our site
can handle on any given day given how the system is built. I've fixed
three or four bottlenecks already to get us to this point, by the way --
we've simply hit a point where sendmail can't go any further without
some significant coding, and it's the real bottleneck now, not Mailman.