[Mailman-Users] list too big?

[Jon Carnes]

On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 07:26, Dave Stern - Former Rocket Scientist wrote:
> We have a tiny sun ultra 10 handling 100-200 lists with general success.
> It's running an older version of MM (2.0.13) as I haven't gotten around
> to upgrading and don't see many new features we'd want.  Most of our lists
> have 3-400 users and work fine. I just recently added one with over 11,000
> addresses. Coincidentally, or not, the machine periodically hangs when this
> list tries to send out. This is despite having added some failsafes in
> sendmail eg load average refuse/delay queuing, connect and bad rcpt
> throttling etc.
> 
> One thing I've see in the qrunner log is:
>   Could not acquire qrunner lock
> 
> Suggestions? Has anyone had any experience with really large lists on
> really small machines?
> 
My guess - RAM.  Add more Ram - lots more RAM.

Mailman loads the entire list into memory when processing it. Your
larger list requires a larger hunk of memory. Look at the servers
utilization when trying to send to that list.  You should be able to
pinpoint the limiting factor.

What sort of disk subsystem do you have?  SCSI or IDE?  If your moving a
lot of traffic or have really large lists, SCSI is a must.

We've discussed large lists a lot in the archives.  If you can not add
more RAM then I suggest you break the larger list down into several
smaller list.

Good Luck -
Jon Carnes