[Mailman-Users] High CPU Load

[Richard Barrett]

On 30 May 2004, at 22:24, Jason Shouler wrote:

> Can anyone offer any suggestions on resolving a high cpu load with 
> Python.
>
> We're using Mailman 2.1.4, Python 2.3.3, Sendmail & Amavis to support 
> an announcement only list of about 40k members

It might be worth considering splitting a list with a fairly big set of 
subscribers into a series of sub lists (say alphabetical by subscriber 
name) and making those sublists the subscribers of the main list. 
Mailman uses pickled Python structures for the per-list "databases" 
which with large numbers of subscribers is stretching things a bit.

> on an IBM Netfinity server (1 Gb RAM).

"IBM Netfinity server" does tell us much about what hardware and OS & 
version is supporting things.

>
> During list activity

What do you mean by list activity? Handling a single outgoing post or 
what.

> CPU load will often exceed 90% with the load being spread fairly 
> evenly between active qrunners (e.g. command, outgoing & virgin 
> runners).
>

How many posts per day are you handling via this lists. How much 
subscribe/unsubscribe and list admin activity are you talking about?

Does anything of significance regarding problems show up in the Mailman 
or MTA logs?

> This I can live with but what I can't live with is the 98% load 
> generated from the web admin interface (driver admin script) which 
> effectively makes the interface unusable.

If this is happening when you do web gui list admin stuff on this very 
large list it tends to reinforce my view that breaking that list into a 
top-level list with a series of sublists, each with fewer subscribers, 
might be worthwhile; smaller pickles to load and save.

>   In fact mailmanctl must be shut down in order to do any remote 
> administration at all!
>

Also have you checked for and cleared out any lurking lock files.

> I've scoured the archives and also tried most options within 
> 'mm_cfg.py' all without success.
>

Is outgoing mail via the MTA on the Mailman server? What sort of values 
are are using for SMTP_MAX_RCPTS?

> It's probably worth pointing out that the same issues existed with 
> previous versions of Python and Mailman.
>

Same list, same problem, maybe ...

> Suggestions anyone?
> -- 
> =============================
> Jason Shouler  DATAFLOW
> Tel/Fax : +44 (0)1202-722599
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