[Mailman-Developers] problem with view other subscriptions..

[Harald Meland]

[Matt Davis]

> On Sun, 14 May 2000, Thomas Wouters wrote:
> 
> > Does the machine it runs on, have a steady clock or do you run
> > 'ntpdate' every 10 minutes because the clock is heavily skewed ?

Ahem, not that it's my business, but that'd be ugly -- if you have a
heavily skewed clock, you'd probably be better off using something
like xntpd.

> > (This happens on some of our early Pentium-II's, can be as much as
> > a few minutes (!!) per hour. An hourly ntpdate fixes the symptoms,
> > but I imagine it can screw Mailman bigtime :P)

Very true.  xntpd does not (normally) adjust the clock in big steps,
but rather corrects it ever so smoothly towards the correct time.

> 1.  Everything runs on 1 machine.
> 2.  No time update utils are running at all..  Basically stock redhat 6.2
> 3.  I think its a stable clock..  it is a ppro 200 mhz, 64 meg ram.  But
> the execution of that command shouldnt matter much if everythings on the
> same machine & time & cpu?

Well, the time used by "view other subscriptions" is proportional to
the number of lists in your Mailman installation, as it beneath the
hood really iterates over all lists.  If it takes more than the lock
lifetime (by default this is 120 seconds), some other process may have
snatched the lock away, causing the error you see.

> Plus i don't have a very loaded mailman site (4 lists tops) and get
> hardly zero traffic. The lists are personal lists.  And the web
> interface is hardly ever used.  And when I was using it.. i was the
> only user.

Strange.  I wouldn't think iterating over as few as 4 lists should
take over 2 minutes to complete...

> i cleared the logs and redid executed the problem.  And logs/locks
> never got anything...

Try again, but only after you have put

  LIST_LOCK_DEBUGGING = 1

in your Mailman/mm_cfg.py, as current CVS Mailman has debug lock
logging turned off by default.
-- 
Harald