[Mailman-Users] Big Lists

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 17 Dec 2001 20:33:23 -0800 
Dan Wilder <dan at ssc.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 06:39:54PM -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
>> On Mon, 17 Dec 2001 18:01:56 -0800 Dan Wilder <dan at ssc.com>
>> wrote:

>> Without those changes in place (more exctly, using the
>> Debian/Linux defaults) a Dual PII-333 on the end of a Tier 2 T3
>> has regularly sustained just under 1,400 deliveries (to target
>> MX) per minute for me.  While I've not maintained that level for
>> more than single digit minutes (not enough traffic) that sums to
>> 80K messages per hour.  I've been happy enough with those numbers
>> for the box in question that I haven't looked further.

> I began to see signs of thrashing some place between a couple of
> thousand recipients, and 10,000.  There was what appeared to be a
> phase transition of sorts, above which waits began to predominate
> and I believe delivery rate may have even gone down.

<nod> The largest load I've thrown on that box was 10K spool entries
with 50K RCPT TOs.  A more typical load is 3K spool entries and 15K
RCPT TOs from a single qrunner dump.  (Yeah, I do 5 per on RCPT TOs
and I hand moderate in messages in batches) At those levels I've not
noticed any thrashing.

> I'm not getting anything like 1400 deliveries/minute (I don't
> think).  

A typical average for me (given that the box also does web duty and
a bunch of other bits) is ~700 per minute (40K per hour), but that's
when the spool is well stuffed with dead mail, PostgresQL is getting
hit via Apache from other quarters, etc.  1,400/minute is more
typical when running off a fairly clean slate with a pre-stuffed DNS
cache.

> I'll try measuring delivery rate during this week's large
> announce-lists posting, then next week set disable_dns_lookups and
> see what change there may be.

Cool.

BTW: I like David Schweikert's MailGraph tool for Postfix stat
collection/graphing .  Quite sweet if rather CPU intensive.

  http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~dws/software/mailgraph/

> The DSL does get to be pretty much of a nuisance to run vi on over
> an ssh connection, when the list mail is going out.

Hehn.  I tend to SSH in to the firewall, then SSH to the target box
with X11 forwarding turned on all the way so I can run XEmacs on the
target and have it display locally...

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.