[Mailman-Users] Performance on mailman

[Mark Sapiro]

Peter Kofod wrote:

>Any thoughts on what it means when the process is in a wa (wait?) state as opposed to id (idle?).  I am wondering if there is some type of thread blocking (I am not a developer, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night).  Just wondering out aloud.  Am I on to something or am I off the rocker?


I am far from a *nix guru. I last did OS admin/development/maintenance
on the GE/Honeywell GECOS-III/GCOS-8 mainframe systems (but I do know
what the gecos field in the Unix password file was originally used for
and why it's called gecos).

Anyway, the only help I can offer is to tell you what the Mailman
processes are doing.

mailmanctl basically spawns all the qrunners and then calls Python's
os.wait() function which is a built-in function which waits until a
child process exits and then returns it's pid and exit status.

The qrunners process their respective queues. When there's nothing in
the queue, the runner is in a loop which sleeps (via Python's
time.sleep() function) for mm_cfg.QRUNNER_SLEEP_TIME, wakes up, checks
it's queue, finds it empty and sleeps again. Default
QRUNNER_SLEEP_TIME is seconds(1). You can set it longer in mm_cfg.py.
I don't know if this will help or not.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan