[Mailman-Users] big lists, big messages

[alex wetmore]

On Sat, 12 May 2001, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> On 5/12/01 6:52 PM, "Ian White" <iwhite at victoria.tc.ca> wrote:
> > Which variables should be changed? It looks like the following could use
> > some changes:
> > SMTP_MAX_RCPTS = 500
>
> Between 5 and 10 - that should be set for any mailman installation. 500 is
> way too high for reasonable performance.

This blanket statement is not always correct.  It strongly depends on
the MTA that you are using.

My mailman installation talks to the Windows 2000 SMTP MTA, where
there are no performance problems with having the batching set to a
very high number.  Multiple queues can send out the same message at
the same time.  Using high SMTP_MAX_RCPTS numbers results in a lot
less disk activity and also means that all of my mail going to
hotmail.com or aol.com can get sent in one transaction.

The statement above is true for many Unix MTAs where the queue runner
can only send one message to one file at time.  If you only give the
MTA a couple of messages to party on then it will only be able to talk
to a couple of remote servers at a time, so sending out a single
message could take quite a while.

What this really means is that you should understand how your MTA
works and choose a SMTP_MAX_RCPTS that works well for your MTA.  I
just think that blanket statements such as "500 is way too high for
reasonable performance" should be avoided, as you never know what MTA
the admin is using.

alex