[Mailman-Developers] Huge lists

[Sean Reifschneider]

On Tue, May 23, 2000 at 12:47:12PM -0400, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
>recipients.  My goal would be for stock Mailman using a fairly simple
>installation on relatively common hardware to easily handle 1M
>recipients.

I guess you'd better define "relatively common hardware".  What are we
talking about here?  Some benchmarking I did of real-world recpieints
has shown that a dual PII 450 with a GB of RAM and the mail spool set
up on a 500MB RAM disc, and upstream connectivity of dual DS3s,
was able to handle around 100k deliveries an hour.  This was using
qmail with a remote concurrency of 250 and a bunch of little tricks.

So, unless I missed something pretty serious in the configuration
of this environment, "relatively common hardware" should include
at least a dozen boxes.

Again, this was a real-world list of around 400k addresses of users
who had signed up to receive a particular announcement.  They have
since moved to a cluster of around 10 machines running some custom
software and are getting over 1M per hour with that setup.

>email lists of varying sizes.  I'd like to create lists of 1k, 10k,
>100k, 250k, 500k, and 1M recipients.  Do you think between us we can
>gather 1M fake recipients for a test list?

I could probably donate 5% to 10% of that amount across a few upstream
lines.

Sean
-- 
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Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo@tummy.com>
URL: <http://www.tummy.com/xvscan> HP-UX/Linux/FreeBSD/BSDOS scanning software.