[Mailman-Users] dumping a large list to a file

[Jon Carnes]

This question comes up fairly regularly, so I wouldn't be surprised if
its covered in the FAQ.

When your lists get really big and it takes forever to do any
maintenance to the config.db then you should look at using a RAM disk. 
You can either set aside working RAM for use as a disk or purchase a
small battery backed-up RAM disk.  Either way, you then simply mount the
lists config directory on the RAM disk (and copy the old config
directory over to it.  After that your operations that used to take 8
hours take 8 minutes.

The size of your Ram disk should be at least twice the size of your
current config directory (which if you'll look is really quite small).

Several folks on this list have similar setups and it has dramatically
increased the responsiveness of huge lists - allowing them to keep
Mailman running on their older less powerful servers.

Another alternative is to move on up to version 2.1 and then to move all
your configurations/email addresses into an SQL database.

Good Luck - Jon Carnes
 
On Wed, 2003-01-22 at 16:07, Scott R. Every wrote:
> I have a list with upwards of 600K emails on it.  Many of the addresses on 
> the list have the nomail bit set, yet when I use 'list_members' there seems 
> to be no way to get only the valid emails(ie no nomail emails listed)
> 
> I have a customer who needs to split this list into X number of pieces in 
> order to send different content to each piece of the list.  The problem is 
> when we work from the file that 'list_members' outputs, mailman spins its 
> wheels trying to deliver mail to the nomail addresses(most of which are not 
> valid addresses) and it slows things way down because the mail server has 
> to deal with all these bounces.
> 
> I have also tried using the dumpdb tool, but it takes upward of 8 hours to 
> dump the whole db which is far too slow.
> 
> Is anyone using segmented lists with mailman?
> has anyone figured out a way to get just the good email addresses out of 
> the mailman db?
> 
> any help would be appreciated.
> 
> thanks
> 
> s
> 
> Scott R. Every   mailto:scott at blast.com
> Blast Inc.       http://www.blast.com
> 1-800-24-BLAST   ext 543
> 
> 
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