[Mailman-Users] generalized specs question

[Brad Knowles]

At 4:51 PM -0500 2004/05/10, Pat Riehecky wrote:

>  The site where I work is considering replacing our current listprocessor
>  (ListProc 6.0c) with either Mailman or Majordomo.  So I was
>  going to as a benchmarking type question, what sort of a system would be
>  required to run 100 lists each sending out 100 emails a day?  Obviously a
>  486 /can/ do it, but reasonibly fast sending is nice.  (ie would something
>  like a pentium2 250 with 128 RAM be enough)

	It's going to depend on things like how big each message is, how 
much delay there is caused by slow recipient systems, how fast your 
disk drives are, what kind of file system you're using, etc....

	I'd recommend a fair amount of RAM (256-512MB), but beyond that 
spend as much money as you can on getting the fastest disk subsystem 
you can (at least a separate disk for the /var/spool/mail filesystem, 
and possibly mirrored+striped), with the fastest filesystem (well, 
fastest filesystem that is safe for your OS).

	But even if you had the fastest computer on earth, that would be 
no guarantee of speed if all your recipients are sending large 
messages and are located behind slow dial-up lines.

>  Secondly how long (estimate, please) would it take to send all 10000
>  emails should they be sent to the lists at the same time?

	This depends on even more factors.


	Check the FAQ wizard at 
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py> and search for things like 
"performance", "verp", and "largest list".  There should be a dozen 
or more hits for these search terms, and you need to read and 
understand each of the FAQ entries in question.

-- 
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.

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.