[Mailman-Users] Large List Considerations

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:28 PM -0500 2004/02/05, Jon Carnes wrote:

>  Depending on your Disk sub-system, Processor, and amount of RAM, 20k
>  members may be not be a lot for Mailman to handle.

	Yes.  Keep in mind that we've had people complain about 
performance with Mailman on some systems with 50k users, and yet 
there are other Mailman systems out there with > 200k users.

	It all depends on your hardware and software configuration. 
Anything can be configured to run dead-dog slow (not uncommon in 
out-of-the-box configurations), while most anything can be tweaked to 
be significantly faster.

>  If however you find that messages spend a long time in the queue before
>  being processed (or web-access to the list configuration is very slow to
>  load) then you might want to consider putting aside some ram for use as
>  a disk.  You can copy your ~mailman/lists/... to this RAM drive and
>  mount it over the ~mailman/lists (then startup Mailman).  Access to the
>  lists and configuration will then be much faster.

	Hmm.  Is this really safe?  What happens if there is a crash? 
Are those files safely written to physical media somewhere before the 
dangerous stuff is started?  If you had a spontaneous crash, how much 
could you lose?

>  Note: the RAM drive *must* be at least twice the size as the data stored
>  in it, so that Mailman can make backup copies of the config files while
>  doing changes.

	I would say that it should be considerably more than twice, to 
leave some slack for the filesystem code to do it's job properly.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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