[Savannah-hackers-public] Re: Mailman upgrade

[Sylvain Beucler]

Sysadmin,

Karl and I have had a look at the Mailman held messages.

We have a growing list of around 120,000 messages, all in the same
directory.

I state it, so you keep that in mind for the upcoming mail system. For
example, Karl mentioned a Mailman feature to clean-up old requests,
but nor Sarge not Fedora 4 include it yet.

What's your point on this? Do you already have something in mind to
cope with all those held messages? Do you think this currently
significantly impact performances?


More details now - a direct reply to Karl :)

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 01:19:55PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote:
> On the other hand, just rm'ing the files didn't work well either; then
> the msgs were still visible in the pending queue, albeit with some
> information missing.  However, doing that will at least clean up the
> directory, so maybe it is the way to go for now.

I did so for removed mailing lists (~500 msgs), and also removed held
messages under an old format (files in *.txt) back from 2002 (~6000
msgs). More precisions in the ChangeLog.


I also noticed that you see the "pending queue [...] with some
information missing" only once. After that, Mailman regenerates
request.pck; so a little curl
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/admindb/listname -F adminpw=***** per
list would clean the list of messages.

Instead of (or in addition to) setting up a clean-up cron-job (I hope
the next mailsystem will use that recent version of Maiman), an
alternative would be to cope with the "top-ten", which accounts for
around around 50% of all messages:

   1017 adhoc
   1099 alcovebook-dev
   1116 fsfe-portugal
   1162 dmca-activists
   1259 gnump3d-devel
   1311 bug-gnu-chess
   1634 a2ps
   2426 info-gnu-fortran
   2484 cons-discuss
  11556 bug-vcdimager
  29634 info-cvs


Last 6 months of all held messages represent more than half of all
held messages actually, so maybe it's not as useful as I though wrt
performances - we always get thousands of held messages at once,
unless we clean messages earlier than after 6 months.

-- 
Sylvain