[Mailman-Users] mailman minimal (memory) requirements?

[Brad Knowles]

Carl Zwanzig wrote:

>> > I'm trying to run mailman 2.1.8 on a system with only 32 MB RAM (and
>> > ~100 MB swap).
>
>> So, at an absolute minimum, this machine would require ~236MB swap space
>> and ~56MB of real RAM, plus the OS requirements.  Given these numbers, I
>> wouldn't try to run Mailman on a machine with less than 512MB of swap
>> and 128MB of RAM.
>
> FWIW, I'm running mailman on an openbsd system w/ 64M ram and 200M swap
> on an old Compaq P90.  Active software includes mailman (2.1.5), apache,
> postfix, and bind.  Not very speedy, but works well enough for <50 member
> lists.

Cool.  I'll update the FAQ entry with this info.

> top tells me:
> Memory: Real: 23M/47M act/tot  Free: 11M  Swap: 41M/200M used/tot

Can you get more process-specific information about Mailman, apache,
postfix, and BIND?

On the BSD system I previously quoted from, I was running commands like:

    % ps auxww | grep -i mailman | awk '{ sum+=$5 } END { print sum }'

... in order to get the VSZ (virtual size) information, and using
"...$6..." to get the physical RAM usage.

> There are tiny web and smtp servers, but I suspect that most of them will
> be missing -some- feature that mailman needs. While trying to shoehorn a
> working system onto some "interesting" platform can be fun, life will be
> easier if you can add a bunch of memory.

Yup.  But it would be interesting to do some tests and see if we can find
out what a reasonable minimum system configuration really is for these
kinds of things.  Your 64MB/200MB system is smaller than I thought would
work even moderately well (based on the information I had gathered), but
it may be that we could cut things down even more.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.