[Mailman-Developers] VERPing: ouch!

[Fil]

> I think there's a small design flaw with the once-in-a-wile VERPing scheme.
> My biggest list is 180k subscribers, and I've set up Mailman to VERP once
> every 10th message. Well, it happened today that the big list was hit by its
> VERP time, and it's a bit awful - it looks like the list has taken control
> of Mailman, and no other mail can pass through it.

In fact I bragged: it's only 152991 subs :)

Here's the smtp log line:
Jul 13 02:05:22 2004 (435) <20040712150834.DCA153680BD at alan.rezo.net> smtp
        for 152991 recips, completed in 31782.241 seconds

At 02:05 suddenly all the other messages that were waiting to be sent were
sent, and the server went into unstable mode (my graphics logs did panic for
a while), then everything reverted to normal.

In any case, 2 seconds per VERP message for such a big list is too costly,
so I'll just disable VERPing the normal messages for now - with the price of
not being able to clean the list as efficiently as I could with the
occasional VERP.

I hope this feedback can be useful, if you have scalability in mind for MM3.

-- Fil