[techtalk] sendmail/Mailman Lag

[Sheryl Weidner]

Jen,

I run Mailman 2.0b2 on one production server and 2.0b5 on the other
production server for my own lists.  crontab.in on my systems contains
entries for logging, archiving, mail to news gateways, etc. but doesn't
appear to have any direct impact on when a message is delivered, except in
the case of retrying previously bounced messages.

Mailman has a setting for each list which determines how many simultaneous
outbound connections can be open.  By default, this is set to "5" -
probably good for the load on your server, but not great when you have
hundreds of list members (as I do).  If your server's hardware/RAM/network
connection are sufficient to handle it, you can improve delivery time
somewhat by increasing the number of simultaneous deliveries.

Some of it is just "how mailman works" - From
/home/mailman/scripts/mailcmd:

# Create the message object
msg = Message.Message(sys.stdin)
# Immediately queue the message for disposition by qrunner, most likely in
# about a minute from now.  The advantage to this approach is that
# messages should never get lost -- some MTAs have a hard limit to the
# time a filter prog can run.  Postfix is a good example; if the limit is
# hit, the proc is SIGKILL'd giving us no chance to save the message. It
# could take a long time to acquire the lock.  This way we're fairly safe
# against catastrophe at the expense of more disk I/O.

This makes it look like the delay is intentional, as mailman creates a
database object out of the mail object.  So some of the delay may be
unavoidable. 

Kind of rambly here... hope some of this helps. :)  It was a good excuse
for me to dig around a little and get a better handle on what Mailman is
doing...

-Saska

On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, JLG wrote:

> On Thu, 10 Aug 2000, JLG wrote:
> 
> I think I've figuered out thatMailman is using cron to send out its
> messages. How can I make the job run more frequently?
> 
> in /home/mailman/cron there are the following files:
> 
> checkdbs  crontab.in  gate_news  mailpasswds  nightly_gzip  paths.py
> paths.pyc  qrunner  senddigests
> 
> would crontab.in be the file I need to change?
> Mailman's docs are kind of sparse but i can include a copy of this file if
> it'll help
> 
> Jen
> 
> > First, thanks to all who offered suggestions to get
> > Mailman up and running...and it is working just very, very slowly.
> > 
> > First, a little info about the machine  ("gundam") it is installed on:
> > Redhat 6.2
> > Sendamail 8.9.3
> > I believe Procmail handles local delivery in Redhat
> > 
> > I have some accounts on gundam subscribed to the list "listfoo"
> > I also have an account on another machine on the network subscribed as
> > well. 
> > 
> > If I just send a plain old email from one account to the other on gundam
> > it arrives in seconds. If I post to listfoo it takes anywhere from
> > 2-15min to arrive in the boxes of the other subscribers. This 
> > huge delivery lag is also the case for the account on another machine so
> > I'm ruling out a local delivery problem. 
> > 
> > Everything in the maillog looks kosher, here's a snip from a message 
> > outgoing to listfoo:
> > 
> > 
> > sendmail[3220]: JAA03220: from=<jlg at gundam.xxxxx.com>, size=262,
> > class=0, pri=30262, nrcpts=1,
> > msgid=<Pine.LNX.4.21.0008100939300.3217-100000 at gundam.xxxxx.com>,
> > proto=ESMTP, relay=IDENT:jlg at gundam.xxxxx.com [127.0.0.1]
> > Aug 10 09:39:50 gundam
> > sendmail[3221]: JAA03220: to="|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post listfoo",
> > delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=prog, stat=Sent
> > 
> > ----------------------------
> > 
> > Here's some headers from a listfoo post (this arrived the same time as
> > one send 20 min before it!?!):
> > 
> > Return-Path: <listfoo-admin at gundam.xxxxx.com>
> > Received: from gundam.xxxxx.com (IDENT:mailman at gundam.xxxxx.com
> >     [127.0.0.1])
> >         by gundam.xxxxx.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA03242;
> >         Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:42:01 -0400
> > Received: from gundam.xxxxx.com (IDENT:jlg at gundam.xxxxx.com
> > [127.0.0.1])
> >         by gundam.xxxxx.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA03220
> >         for <listfoo at gundam.xxxxx.com>; Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:39:50 -0400
> > Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2000 09:39:50 -0400 (EDT)
> > From: jlg <jlg at gundam.xxxxx.com>
> > To: listfoo at gundam.softcom.com
> > Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0008100939300.3217-100000 at gundam.xxxxx.com>
> > MIME-Version: 1.0
> > Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
> > Subject: [Listfoo] 9:44
> > Sender: listfoo-admin at gundam.xxxxx.com
> > Errors-To: listfoo-admin at gundam.xxxxx.com
> > X-BeenThere: listfoo at gundam.xxxxx.com
> > X-Mailman-Version: 2.0beta5
> > Precedence: bulk
> > List-Id: listfoo a cool list for testing <listfoo.gundam.xxxxx.com>
> > 
> >   
> > -----
> > 
> > Any suggstions? Any more info required to troubleshoot?
> > 
> > Jen
--
Saska - saska at noogie.com - http://www.noogie.com/~saska

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