[Mailman-Users] Speeding up delivery

[John W Baxter]

At 14:45 +0100 1/31/01, Florian Weimer wrote:
>Is it possible to tell Mailman to send outgoing mail for a mailing
>list in several separate batches? My mailer (Exim) delivers a message
>for multiple recipients sequentially.  Of course, this is more
>efficient in terms of network usage, but processing several batches in
>parallel is faster (and network bandwidth isn't an issue here).

Exim, if new enough, can be configured to run multiple processes, each
working on some distinct domain in an outgoing message going to multiple
domains.

We haven't yet tried this on the machine running Mailman (because those
lists don't fit the pattern of being large lists with addresses on lots of
domains)...for the machine running Majordomo on a large list, adjusting the
Exim configuration dramatically improved delivery time.  You might also
want to adjust the time Exim is willing to wait for a response from an SMTP
server...we had left that at its default setting (which is to use the host
system's timeout...that timeout jumped hugely either in an update of Linux
or in the earlier switch from BSDi Unix to Linux.  The combination of the
two Exim adjustments reduced the first pass time through the list from well
over 24 hours down to around 2 1/2 hours.

   --John
-- 
John Baxter   jwblist at olympus.net      Port Ludlow, WA, USA