[Mailman-Users] New High Performance Installation

[J C Lawrence]

On Mon, 13 May 2002 12:55:14 -0700 
Jamie Penner <jpenner at nisa.net> wrote:

> The list volume is approx 400,000 emails daily.  Twice a month, this
> will jump to 700,000 a day.  These will be html and text messages -
> outgoing only.

Let's be a little more clear as to what numbers these are:

  How many subscribers?

  How many messages sent to the list for broadcast (not how many the
  list will send, but how many sent TO the list)?

I doubt you wish to send 400K messages to each of your subscribers.
I suspect that you have 400K subscribers etc.

Notes:

  Recommend Mailman 2.1beta instead of 2.0.10.

  Your MTA will be the source of your performance problems.  Spend your
  time there.  Carefully.  MTA and system tuning is a careful and
  detailed process.  Read the FAQ.  

  I'd generally recommend that you use a physically different system for
  final deliveries than the one Mailman runs on.  The easy way to do
  this is to have Mailman deliver to localhost, and then configure the
  MTA on localhost to use a smarthost.

> PIII 1.3Ghz dual CPU (512KB L2 cache), 512MB PC133 ECC Registered
> (1x512), 2x18GB Ultra160 10000rpm (RAID 1 configuration), 32MB cache
> high-performance Mylex AcceleRAID controller (A170), Tyan Thunder LE-T
> S2518UNG (Intel ServerWorks ServerSet III chipset), CD-ROM drive, dual
> 100Mb/s FE, VGA, Dual-channel Adaptec Ultra160 SCSI controller, 400W
> power supply

Add some RAM.  

Make sure that /var/spool is mounted noatime.

If you can, dedicate a physical RAID array to /var/spool that is not
shared with any other partitions.  

You'll need more disks to do this.

Turn of fsync in syslog.

etc etc 

> Is anyone familiar with a MailMan installation doing this type of
> volume or does anyone have any advice on this install.

Yes.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.