[Mailman-Users] mailman 2.1b3 qrunner performance (backlog)

[Andrew D. Clark]

I recently upgraded from mailman 2.0.12 to 2.1b3 and am quite pleased with 
the new qrunner setup (among other things).  We have one particularly high 
volume list with very bursty postings (since the main poster is scripting 
postings).  In mailman 2.0.12 we'd often have hundreds of files stuck in 
the qfiles directory, sometimes for hours.  Now, postings go through much 
more quickly.  However, archiving still lags quite a bit, and that qrunner 
has _very_ long run times:

mailman  5476 93.5  2.7 32188 31388  ??  R     4:18PM 115:01.18 qrunner 
/home/services/mailman/bin/qrunner --runner=ArchRunner:0:1 -s (python)

I'm pretty sure lag in archiving is what was causing the whole thing to 
back up in 2.0.12.  So, although the backlog is now mostly isolated to 
archiving (a very good thing) I'm looking for a solution to fix that.  Not 
archiving is not an option.  Should forking more ArchRunners help with 
this, or will this just cause more contention?

My platform is FreeBSD 4.6-STABLE on a 700mhz PIII with 1GB RAM, running 
mailman 2.1b3 with Exim 4.05.

--
Andrew Clark
Campus Network Programmer
Office of Information Technology
University of California, Santa Barbara
andrew.clark at ucsb.edu (805) 893-5311