[Mailman-Users] How to decrease high loads

[J C Lawrence]

On Fri, 17 Nov 2000 12:54:28 -0800 
Sarah K Miller <techgrrl at beeze.com> wrote:

> Our MTA is sendmail. What we're seeing is multiple python
> processes spawning, which seem to eat huge amounts of
> resources. Is this normal?

Without stats and logs on what those processes are, and what their
observed runtime behaviour is I'm going to assume a few things:

  It seems likely that the processes in question are queue runners
(ie processes that are attemting to deilver mail to recipients).  If
so, you need to reconfigure your MTA (sendmail) to use a reasonable
number of queue runners and no more.  I'm not a sendmail user, and
am not familiar with recent versions, so I'll let others comment on
the specifics there.

  That said, I would of course recommend moving to another more
reasonable/scalable MTA such as Exim or Postfix.  This is not to say
that sendmail can't be made to work well for you -- just that I
consider doing so needlessly difficult to both accomplish and
monitor.

  While unlikely (I've run larger setups on smaller systems without
problems) if the large number of executing processes are Mailman
wrapper instances, especially wrapper instances that area handling
"post", then you are likely running Mailman v1.0 or earlier.  v1.1
improves this area slightly.  v2,w hich not quite ready for prime
time (its close) improves it significantly.

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