[Mailman-Users] Traffic with a large list

alex wetmore alex at phred.org
Tue Apr 2 16:36:34 CEST 2002


It probably won't be quite that bad though, because your MTA will
probably batch multiple recipients on a message who are in the same
domain.

10kb is also a very large average message size.  The average message
size on my lists is a lot closer to 1kb.

My system hosts two fairly large lists.  One is 1600 members and has
an average of 50 messages per day.  The other is 1000 members and has
an average of 80 messages per day.  I find that my total bandwidth
usage is about 10gb-12gb per month, and that includes personal use of
my DSL connection (ie, it isn't all mail).

Current counters from my MTA:
43.61 day uptime
1,675,934 messages sent
10,198,549,774 bytes

Switching that to per month:
30 days
1,152,901 messages sent
7,015,741,646

In March 5428 messages were sent out on my lists.  That works out to
212 messages sent by my MTA for each message sent by a list on
average (kind of a meaningless number unless I work out how many
recipients each message went to, so that I can figure out how many
messages my MTA sends per recipient).

I am doing one major thing different than most mailman users.  My MTA
is Windows 2000 SMTP Server, which has no problem sending one message
to multiple domains at the same time.  This means that my batching
number is very high (currently mailman sends 1000 recipients to my MTA
per message).  Most people recommend setting this to a much lower
number (5 or 10) on Unix MTAs because they can't send the same message
to two domains at the same time (or that is my understanding).

alex

On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Baba wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Assuming an average message size of 10 KB, and an average of 75 e-mails per day,
> mailman will be sending out:
>
> 0.01 x 75 x 5000 = 3750MB = 3.75 GB per day
>
> (i.e. mail_size_in_MB x mail_per_day x no_of_members)
>
> That works out to 112.5 GB per month.
>
> I suspect your ISP will want to charge you a lot of extra for that kind of
> bandwidth usage....
>
> --
> Baba the Cat
> www.catbaba.com
> PGP key at: www.ummah.com/pgpkeys
> "I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is
> infinitely superior." - Hippolyte Taine
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Olwen Williams" <olwen at ossg.info>
> To: <mailman-users at python.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 6:40 AM
> Subject: [Mailman-Users] Traffic with a large list
>
>
> > Mailman is pre-installed with web-hosting I have.  I'm considering
> > moving a large active list to it.  There are currently over 5000 members
> > on the Yahoogroups list,  with 50-100 messages a day, fully-moderated by
> > a panel of moderators.  I feel sure mailman could cope with the volumes,
> > but can anyone give me a feel for the bandwidth involved with a list of
> > this size?
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------
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> > Mailman-Users at python.org
> > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users
> > Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py
> >
>
>
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