[Mailman-Users] Large site mailman config

[Brad Knowles]

At 10:31 AM +0000 2006-03-03, George Barnett wrote:

>  Could somebody please send me a config for a large mailman site?

	In my experience, these kinds of things need to be developed 
specifically for a given site.  SourceForge and lists.apple.com may 
both be exceptionally large Mailman sites, but their traffic patterns 
may not be anything remotely similar.  And neither of them are likely 
to be anything like a monster announce-only list with 500k 
recipients, where announcements are made once a week or once a month.

>  We're seeing our mailman queue wedge fairly frequently.  A simple
>  restart sorts this out, but I'd like to see if there's anything else I
>  can do to prevent this.

	What do you mean by "wedge"?  Which process(es) is/are failing or 
getting "wedged"?

>  We have the following relevant options set:
>
>  QRUNNERS = [
>       ('ArchRunner',     4), # messages for the archiver
>       ('BounceRunner',   2), # for processing the qfile/bounces directory
>       ('CommandRunner',  1), # commands and bounces from the outside world
>       ('IncomingRunner', 4), # posts from the outside world
>       ('NewsRunner',     1), # outgoing messages to the nntpd
>       ('OutgoingRunner', 4), # outgoing messages to the smtpd
>       ('VirginRunner',   1), # internally crafted (virgin birth) messages
>       ('RetryRunner',    3), # retry temporarily failed deliveries
>       ]

	For the mailing lists hosted on python.org (including the 
mailman-users mailing list), we have not found it necessary to modify 
the default QRUNNERS values.

	I can't speak for any other Mailman site.

>  # Default queue stuff is shite.
>  QRUNNER_LOCK_LIFETIME = hours(20)
>  QRUNNER_PROCESS_LIFETIME = hours(2)
>  QRUNNER_MAX_MESSAGES = 50000
>  DELIVERY_RETRY_WAIT=minutes(10)
>  # Max recipients for each message
>  SMTP_MAX_RCPTS = 150
>  # Max messages sent in each SMTP connection
>  SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION = 25
>  ARCHIVE_TO_MBOX = 0

	Again, for the mailing lists for python.org, we haven't found it 
necessary to modify any of these values from their defaults set in 
Defaults.py.

	Most of my work in doing performance tuning for python.org has 
been within the MTA, and I've tried to make as much of that 
information available in the FAQ Wizard -- search for "performance".

-- 
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/>.