[Mailman-Users] maximum size of mailman .mbox files

[John Dennis]

On Fri, 2005-08-19 at 16:17 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>     Brad> At 2:59 PM -0500 2005-08-17, Stephen S Kelley wrote:
> 
>     >> I'm running mailman 2.1.5 on fedora2 and the box has ample
>     >> resources. Are there any OS problems a 2GB?
> 
>     Brad> 	Dunno.  But you'd be more likely to get an answer to
>     Brad> your question if you used resources appropriate to your OS.
> 
> If John Dennis doesn't show up shortly with an answer, I recommend you
> write to Red Hat support and ask about "large file support in Python".

Sorry, I was lurking because I don't have any definitive information at
my finger tips. The answer has two components, the max file size of the
file system and the max file size python can handle. I'm assuming the
installation is on an ext3 partition. The max files size on ext3 depends
on the block size, it ranges from 16GB to 4TB on a 32bit CPU. However
python and other software has to be able to manage file pointer offsets,
which without any direct knowledge I suspect are 32 bit representations
on a 32 bit CPU. I suspect that probably limits practical file sizes
using python to 4GB. But like I said, I don't know this as a fact, just
guessing. Bottom line, I don't think you're likely to have a problem any
time soon just based on file sizes. The time to process an archive of
that size, the likelyhood  of corrupted individual emails in an mbox of
that size, and the utility of that much data are other issues.
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>