[Mailman-Developers] What happens with mailman after a crash

[John Dennis]

On Tue, 2004-01-27 at 13:26, Les Niles wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Jan 2004 04:39:24 -0800 "Somuchfun" <somuchfun at atlantismail.com> wrote:
> >I have a question in regards to mailman's recovery abilities.
> >Let's say mailman is running and sending out messages to a large list and
> >the machine crashes or is rebooted, does mailman pickup where it stopped? Or
> >is the run gone forever?
> 
> I've had way too much experience with this lately... :(
> 
> Mailman soldiers on just fine.  The problems we've run into are
> with some of mailman's files getting corrupted because they weren't
> synced to disk when the machine crashed -- the standard problem
> with any crash.  I've had to rebuild a couple of list config
> databases, and toss out a few corrupted pending pickles.  We plan
> to try the synchronous-write option, do backups (!), and maybe even
> replace the flakey hardware that's been causing the crashes.
> 

Doesn't the new SYNC_AFTER_WRITE flag address this issue? Here is the doc
for it:

# This flag causes Mailman to fsync() its data files after writing and
# flushing its contents.  While this ensures the data is written to disk,
# avoiding data loss, it may be a performance killer.  Note that this flag
# affects both message pickles and MailList config.pck files.