On 5 Aug 98 at 1:00, List-Managers-Digest wrote:
>Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 15:30:05 -0500 (CDT)
>From: Micah Thompson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Fastest List?
>
>Hello,
>
>I just setup a majordomo list for a local weather Email Alert system, and
>need some tips.
>
>I need more speed! The list's objective is this: To get the alert out
>to all the subscribers in record speed. Actual subscribers cannot post
>to the list, so it's just a distribution list really.
<SNIP>
>If the weather warning expires at 3:30pm, and a subscriber doesn't
>receive it until 4:30pm, they tend to get irrate. ;)
>
Well, one possible speed improvement would be to take Majordomo out of
the loop entirely. Just set up an account on the machine which has the
sole purpose of running a job every five or ten minutes, which can then
distribute the mail in its inbox, if there is any. Admittedly, this is
the next nearest thing to re-writing Majordomo, so that may not be the way
to go. Also, you would lose the ability for people to subscribe
themselves to the list, most likely, so, on second thought, this may
really _not_ be the way to go.
The real strategy here is to first determine what the bottleneck is. It
could be one of a number of things: network connection(s), the load the
machine is carrying for other tasks, or the time it takes to process the
mailing lists via the perl script you mentioned.
If possible, I would suggest having the perl script modified slightly so
that when the next alert went out, it put the time-stamp for each message
into a file. Then you could examine the file to see how long after the
alert was first sent to majordomo it took for the mail to start to be
distributed.
The next thing to do would be to examine the logs for the httpd program.
See if you can get information about how many hits it is getting during
the time that the weather warning is being emailled. If it's getting lots
of hits during the email distribution time, then you might begin to
think about getting another machine to handle the email.
If the machine is getting few or some hits during the email
distribution, it might be a network limitation, and you might investigate
to see where the limiting factor in network bandwidth is.
Hope this helps,
Anthony J. Albert
==============================================================
Anthony J. Albert [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Systems and Software Support Specialist Postmaster
Computer Services - University of Maine, Presque Isle
"The World Wide Web is just like its namesake, the spider's web -
full of dirt and bugs!"
