[Mailman-Users] big lists, big messages

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 12 May 2001 20:36:37 -0700 
Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui at plaidworks.com> wrote:

> QRUNNER_LOCK_LIFETIME be longer than however long it takes to
> deliver your really large message, or the system will assume the
> lock is dead and break it. You don't want it too large, because if
> the system does lock for some reason, it'll take a HUGE time to
> recover, so it takes some experimentation.

> If this value is too small, it's VERY possible for qrunner to be
> delivering your newsletter, for the lock to time out, and for
> another qrunner to start up break the lock as dead, and start
> sending your newsletter out again -- you send out random numbers
> of duplicates until you figure it out or happen to get in below
> the lock lifetime....

I find this curious.  I have MAX_RCPT_TO set to 5, and to broadcast
30 messages to a subscriber base of 1,000 (ie 6,000 spool entries)
through qrunner to the MTA (postfix) on a dual PII-333 takes just
over 6 seconds once started.  Admittedly that's an appreciable time,
but its also not that long a time in the lands of lock contention
and lock timeouts.

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows