I have a rather large mailing list (35000 members) which is used for announcements only, but I have been experiencing terrible performance problems when the qrunner is active. The mail server is Postfix, Mailman is version 2.1.3 (previous versions showed the same problems).
Just checking, but have you seen the following FAQ entries? See:
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=all#4.11> <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=all#4.12> <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=all#6.4> <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=all#6.6>
I figure you probably have already seen them, but I wanted to be sure.
When I send an outgoing mail, the qrunner processes take up all my CPU and the hard disk becomes inaccessible due to constant IO. Even when there is very little activity in the list and the queues are cleared, the server locks up for several seconds every time an operation is performed.
What about the machine you're doing this on? The filesystem? How is postfix configured?
If you read Nick Christenson's book _Sendmail Performance Tuning_, please note that many of the criteria are also applicable to other MTAs. See <http://www.jetcafe.org/~npc/book/sendmail/> for more info. Disclaimer: Nick was my co-author for a talk I gave previously (see <http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/dihses/>), and I was a technical reviewer of this book.
Clearly, there may well be lots of opportunity here to tune your filesystem for maximum performance.
I am not familiar with the exact way the application operates, but are the mlist arrays shared/marshalled across the qrunner processes via the _listcache? If so, then would it be possible to eliminate the mlist.Load() in the OutgoingRunner and implement delayed saving in the mailing list class so that Save() didn't cause a write to disk each time?
Depending on what your "SMTP_MAX_RCPTS" value is set to, I would imagine that this should be loaded and saved each time a message is passed from your mailman qrunner to postfix. The higher SMTP_MAX_RCPTS, the less often this process should occur. Of course, others have found that SMTP_MAX_RCPTS should typically be set somewhere between 2 and 10 (usually ~5) for best overall performance (see the FAQ entries above).
-- Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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