[Mailman-Users] Massive list prevents other lists' posts?

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 27 Feb 2001 11:54:02 -0800 
Neil Kandalgaonkar <neilk at ActiveState.com> wrote:

> We're using Mailman to manage many lists. Our announcement list is
> very large, 50,000+ users.

> Whenever we post a message to the very large list, posts stop
> flowing from the others.

This is a performance tuning problem.  You need to do a flowpath
analysis to see where your bottlenecks are and what is causing
them.  Probable causes:

  -- Bad choice of MTA (eg Sendmail)
  -- Bad configuration of MTA (eg list posts are DNS verified upon receipt)
  -- Bad name resolution support (eg no system-local DBS cache)
  -- Bad RCPT TO size bundling (mailman config)

> I've looked through the Mailman source to figure out why, and I'm
> stumped.  It seems to me that nothing should be impeding the other
> lists from injecting their messages into the queue, interleaved
> with the mass mailout from the announcement list.

Without knowing the version of Mailman being used and a host of
other system particulars, this is impossible to answer.  My best
guess however would be choice of MTA and bad MTA configuration as
the likely causes.

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