[Mailman-Users] Slow Performance on Mailman, Next Steps?

[Jon Carnes]

On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 14:45, Eric Miller wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> We moved our mailman list over from yahoo to my server this
> week.  No a painless move but it went OK.
> (This is some pretty good software!)
> 
> My big issue is performance.  Our list has 2300 subscribers and
> we do about 20 to 50 e-mails a day, nothing too big.
> 
> Messages were taking 3 to 4 hours to be sent.  I went through
> the FAQ on performance and have done the following to get down
> to 30 to 90 minutes:
> 
> 1: Put in a DNS server on my machine with caching (pdnsd)
> 2: Used the following mailman settings: 
>     DELIVERY_MODULE = 'SMTPDirect'
>     SMTP_MAX_RCPTS = 3
>     SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION = 100
> 3: Turned off the logging
> 

Some folks will tell you to set SMTP_MAX_RCPTS = 500 but I've found for
my servers running Sendmail that 5 (or as high as 10) is the fastest
value.

Sendmail - as shipped by most generic distributors of Linux - is not
optimized for speed. It is optimized to run using the lowest amount of
resources so that it can run well on a POC computer pressed into service
as a server.  You have a *real* server so resources are not a concern.

If what you want is speed, then you should apply some or all of the
optimizations that I've published to the list in the past.  You can also
find them on the last page of my Mailserver Class notes:
  http://www.trilug.org/~jonc/mailserver

A lot of folks have written me with feed back on their speed increases.
If you do the tweaks I would like to hear your comments as well - both
the good and the bad.

Take care - Jon Carnes

> Some other facts:
> 
> a: I'm running RedHat 9 Linux
> b: We are getting lots of bounces: 258 have been put on hold because they
>    went over their bounce score
> c: I'm using a 2+GHz AMD machine.  Lots of horse power and it seems like
>    I'm not using much.  CPU is sitting at between 5% and 10%
> 
> 
> So, my obvious questions are:
> 
> I: Any suggestions on my mm_cfg.py settings?
> II: Anything else you can recommend?
> III: My assumption is that since I'm using SMTPDirect it doesn't
>      matter if I use the default stuff that comes with Redhat or
>      should I load something better?
> IV: Is it the bounces that are my problem?
> 
> Thank you in advance for any advice!
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Eric Miller