At 8:15 AM -0400 2005-07-16, Jeff Squyres wrote: > Clarifying question, however -- will mailman only make one SMTP > connection at a time (and block all further outgoing processing until > that one SMTP connection is complete)?
Yup. > Is this why you're suggesting > proper tuning of SMTP_MAX_RCPTS? Yup. > We didn't change the value of SMTP_MAX_RCPTS between 2.1.5 and 2.1.6 > (500). Perhaps this is too high (none of our lists have close to 500 > subscribers in a single domain). That's not done on a per-domain basis. Let's say you have 1000 subscribers. With SMTP_MAX_RCPTS set to 500, then you will send out one copy of the message to the first 500 recipients, wait for it to be fully accepted by the MTA, and then send out the second copy of the message to 500 recipients. The result can extremely "peaky" in nature, kind of like taking a car and shifting the gear box directly from 5th gear to 1st, and then from 1st back to 5th. If you break that up into smaller chunks, the system can be processing more of those chunks in parallel, and each chunk can be accepted faster. > We routinely see large sendmail > outgoing queues (and did with 2.1.5, too). Given your configuration, I'm not at all surprised. > A comment in one of the prior e-mails made me go check the other qfiles > directories -- we have a few hundred files in the qfiles/bad directory > (~200) and a few thousand in qfiles/shunt (~4000). What are these > files? (pardon the newbie question) The stuff in the "shunt" queue are messages that were malformed in some way, and Mailman shoved them off to the side because it couldn't deal with them. Whenever you stop and restart Mailman, it will go through the "shunt" queue to see if there is anything it can handle now that previously it could not. This can really hurt startup times, and a large "shunt" queue can hurt you any time you have to move messages into it. You might want to consider turning off Mailman, moving most of the "shunt" messages to a different directory name (maybe shunt.old, or shunt.2005-07-16, or whatever), and then creating a new shunt queue with the exact same ownership and permissions. > Thanks for all your suggestions -- we're checking them in the > background, but it takes a little time to check properly. Also, based > on your replies, I think we need to triple check with our sendmail > maintainers and ensure that they really, really didn't change anything > between when we were running 2.1.5 and 2.1.6 (they swear that they > didn't, but we'll ask again). You definitely want to learn more about your sendmail configuration, yes. -- Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "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 SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info. ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp