[Mailman-Developers] Looking at performance again

[Donn Cave]

Our disk I/O problems will come up towards the end of the month,
with database/2003-May-article 2x the size of 2003-May.txt.  Don't
know if this counts in raw throughput, but it sure has an impact.
Archiving looks to me like the bulk of our system CPU and disk load.

Even less in the raw throughput department, we generate a static
main listinfo page rather than poke through thousands of config.pcks
every time someone wants to see the page.

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In principle threading looks like a can of worms to me.  Still
incomplete support across platforms, problems with things like
signal delivery, increase in complexity and decrease in robustness.
It does depend on the application, but you have to be desperate.

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We don't use NFS, but it's easy to see why someone would want to -
run the web interface and mailman on separate hosts, etc.

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I'm not sure I understand the multiple SMTP backends.  MAL says
"for delivery", which I take to mean incoming.  Our listproc setup
delivers to a single host but sends from multiple hosts - that's
time consuming work that can easily be parallelized.  We'll do
it with Mailman too, have just been procrastinating.  The SMTP
inbound traffic seems relatively trivial to me.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu