[Mailman-Users] BIG discard problem

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Robert" == Robert Echlin <rechlin at ca.stilo.com> writes:

    Robert> That looks like an interesting solution. I'll make a note
    Robert> of it for next time.

Well, last I heard your server was still trying to create the page and
choking.  This will solve that, because there is an index of pending
requests as well as the individual messages.  Removing the messages
causes the server to create a page containing 10000 (or whatever it
was) "I can't find this file" items, and it will then remove the
missing message from the index, too.  But it's slo-o-o-ow and takes a
huge amount of RAM (I don't know why---I'll hazard a guess that it's
holding all those messages in memory, probably as Unicode strings to
add insult to injury).

This solution also clears the index, and your server will unjam.
Because it's not futzing with trying to create a web page at the same
time, it should be a matter of a few seconds (it's always been
instantaneous for me, up to about 500 held messages).

    Robert> The docs describe how to start "withlist", but I think I
    Robert> would have to learn the internals of the Python code
    Robert> pretty thoroughly to be able to reproduce this from
    Robert> scratch.

True.  However, this particular code gets posted every few weeks.
Consider it a magic spell.

    Robert> What's going on in the ...? And what will it prompt me
    Robert> with that I need to hit <return>?

"..." _is_ the prompt.  Python uses indentation to create blocks, not
a begin_token ... end_token sequence.  Changing the prompt tells the
users "you're in a block, be careful to match preceding indentation."
However, here the block is implicit in the statement after the colon,
so you can end it immediately.

    Robert> I also think this answers one of my previous questions -
    Robert> it would have been useful to ask the developers list.

Not really.  You just happened to have the misfortune that all of the
six or so (now seven <wink>) mailman-users folks who have posted this
recipe (or URLs to it) in the past are either on vacation or misread
your original post to indicate that you tried this and it didn't work
for you.  Most of the developers who would bother to respond to such
an OT question are already active on mailman-users.  (Why is it OT?
Because it's a solved problem, with the solution well-known on the
user list.)

Cheers!

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
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