[Mailman-Users] How to decrease high loads

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 16 Nov 2000 15:58:41 -0800 
Sarah K Miller <techgrrl at beeze.com> wrote:

> We're running Mailman on a Sun Sparc Station 5, with 256 megs of
> RAM and a 9.2 Gig hard drive. We've got about 80 lists, with the
> busiest one producing approx 30 messages a day. We have a lot of
> people signing up for lists right now though, creating a lot of
> traffic. We are seeing load averages in excess of 25 when multiple
> sign-ups are being processed. Is there anyway to configure mailman
> to decrease the load average?  And yes, we're working on getting a
> better machine, but we have to limp by with what we have for now .

While you don't provide the details in this area, I'd suspect that
your richest vein for handling this would likely be at the MTA.

Note: Depending on the size of your membership lists, the system you
discuss is more than adequate for handling the better part of a
million messages a day without undue strain.  Mailing lists are not
terribly resource intensive, not at the CPU level.  What they
consume are IO (disk and network) and RAM -- both of which appear
reasonable (tho you don't comment on your connectivity).

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                        : http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--