On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 07:03:23PM -0600, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > > A 486, with maybe 16 meg of memory and a slow hard drive, ought to be more > > than ample, assuming (a fair assumption), that it's going to run some sort of > > standard mailing list software, like, say, mailman under Linux. We're > > talking about a mailing list, after all, that, on a busy day, has fewer than > > several dozen emails. > > the current list server is a PPro 200 with 128MB RAM. it has a 9GB SCSI > disk, and another 18GB SCSI disk. > what beats it up, is that mailman stores its data in huge mbox files; which > have to be locked for each read & write. the server doesn't just get > mailling list traffic; there's also a great many requests for the LKML > archives (lots of web spider traffic, among the real people looking). > when a webspider reads list data; the mbox file for that list has to be > read, once for each message on the list. when we want to add a message to > that list; the mbox file has to be locked, and so other processes block when > trying to read it (or write to it themselves). > > so here are some of the options (note that these are not necessarily > exlcusive, we could do several of these): > 1. rewrite mailman to use an SQL backend. this way we can do lots of > concurrent reads & writes, without blocking lots of processes. > 2. make a separate physical disk for LKML; or TCLUG. this will alleviate the > disk head chatter to a degree, and make somewhat more concurrency possible. > won't alleviate all the process blocking, tho. > 3. get more memory, so more of the mbox files can be held in RAM. the > machine physically won't take more memory tho; so this isn't an option. > 4. get a completely separate box for TCLUG mail. a 486 may suffice; but note > that 486s usually have really awful disk controllers by today's standards. a > few-hundred MHz machine with as much memory as we can cram into it, would be > worlds better. 5. Wait for Mailman 2.1 ... it has support for maildir. Or better, download maildir and help testing it (I am not suggesting to do it on the main mail server!) so it get released sooner. I downloaded the alpha version just out of curiosity to see what it would take to add maildir support... and support is already there. florin -- "If it's not broken, let's fix it till it is." 41A9 2BDE 8E11 F1C5 87A6 03EE 34B3 E075 3B90 DFE4 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 232 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20020129/8e6b5293/attachment.pgp