> The most likely culprit is Mailman and Python, and memory is the > quickest and easiest fix. I'd run top in a terminal, then sit and watch
One thing is supposedly postfix is better at this than sendmail is. There was one time I sent off a (non-spam!) mailing to 200+ addresses, basically at once through a shell for loop. The box's load average climed to over 20, and there was a whole lot of disk activity. Postfix supposedly doesn't need to spawn so many copies, or each fork takes fewer resources than in sendmail. Anyway, I wouldn't probably do the same thing without inserting a 'sleep' in the middle of the loop.
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