mailing list speed

[Adrian Otto]

Matthias,

> qmail is somewhat quick under good conditions, but totally falls apart
> at high injection rates or when upstreams start deferring mail.
>
> I'm not saying that Adrian's qmail is broken, but most qmail Linux
> setups I've seen are unreliable because a) Linux does not by itself
> disable the write cache of IDE hard drives, whereas most drives ship
> with the cache enabled, and b) the qmail directories (/var/qmail, home
> directories) are NOT mounted -o sync as they ought to be -- and then,
> qmail looks fast, but is also quick to lose some mail.

I actually laughed when I got David's message. It was so ironic it was
funny. I scratched my head when he said it was "fast". I was sure the
message was going to be a complaint, but it was a compliment!

The system that hosts the bogofilter mailing lists is a 50 Mhz Sun Sparc 10
running Solaris 7. The system crashes once or twice a week because of disk
problems, but I have not had time to work on it recently. Luckily, since I'm
using the Solaris "logging" feature on the filesystems in that box, it comes
back up in a sane state after a power cycle. I would characterize the
current state of the system as "limping".

Incoming mail first goes through a Postfix mail relay on a Linux system that
does analysis of the message headers for spam filtering purposes, and then
relays the mail to the list server in LA. Naturally, it queues messages when
the list server is down.

I'm planning to reconfigure all of this. The new system is a Sun UltraSPARC
system running Solaris 9. I'm planning to use Postfix instead of Qmail
because I've grown to like Postfix better recently. I'll drop the mail relay
from the mail routing path, and do any spam filtering I need on the
UltraSPARC. I'll still use the Linux system, but it will be configured as a
backup MX. With these changes, the list performance should improve.

I'm also busy deciding what mailing list software I'm going to use. I'm
currently considering Majordomo 2.x and GNU MailMan. If you have an opinion,
today is the day to share it with me.

Cheers,

Adrian


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