[Mailman-Developers] [ mailman-Bugs-558988 ] bad performance for big queue dirs

Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com
Tue, 28 May 2002 11:54:00 -0400


On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 03:16:43PM -0400, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
> There are a lot of unknowns here though.  For example, we don't know
> if your rate limits are caused by MTA or network throttles.  If your
> server is idle then i/o is suspect but we don't know if creating more
> outgoing qrunner processes would help you (by splitting up the queue
> hash space among parallel processes).  Is your MTA spooling to the
> same filesystem that Mailman is spooling off of?  If your MTA is
> throttling and it's running synchronously with the outgoing qrunner
> then Mailman may just be sitting around blocked on output to your
> MTA.  Or maybe your disk subsystem can't take the pressure of Mailman
> reading off of it while your MTA is writing to it.  What happens if
> you put them on different disks and/or controllers?  And what effect
> does using some other filesystem (e.g. reiserfs) have on throughput?

Hmmm... suggestion for future point releases: having some
instrumentation that would make it easier to decide where the throttles
*are* would be Really Useful.  Mailman has lots of *configuration*
knobs, but few *runtime* knobs, that I've seen, and almost *no* meters.

It's a Subsystem; it needs that stuff.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
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