[Mailman-Developers] thoughts on http+smtp

[Ricardo Kustner]

Hi,

First of all, I mentioned this on this list earlier but back then I didnt
get much response so I'm trying it again, now the list seems a bit more
active :)
Anyway, i'm running mailman on a P100 with 64mb... even though that isn't
much compared to today's hardware... it still suffies for most of the needs
(for example, apache is running smoothly on it with quite many hits... with peeks
of 5,000 hits/hour ...there's a mysql server on it too.. handling most of those
requests through auth_mysql).
To get to the point, mailman is the best mailinglist software i found
so far, but one thing that still kinda bothers me sinds the beginning
is that when using the admin pages to approved messages which are held
for approval, the python cgi scripts won't finnish the http request
untill all messages have been feed to the MTA... i'm running a list
with 1,500+ subscribers and when about 20 messages are being approved
at the same time, that means the server will get a huge load in a short
period of time. Also, since the cgi script doesn't finnish untill the
messages have been submitted to the MTA, sometimes the http request
just times out... I personally think that a cgi script do his work
*quickly* and finnish outputting the html asap...
I think it would be great if the admindb.py could just 'mark' messages
to be delivered and a background process handles the dirty work, instead
of having cgi scripts doing the SMTP connections...
and i still vote for having mail, which is held for approval, in a seperate
directory instead of putting them in a python database...
well these are just some thoughts, i hope can start some discussion on it :)

Ricardo.

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