My mailing list is very low traffic. It only sees activity of about 6-7 messages a month, and even that is at peak activity. It can sometimes go a whole month with no messages.
The standard setup for Mailman on a Redhat system seems to be to run qrunner at bootup time via a /etc/init.d script and then have the daemon processes sit there existing in the process list until a mail message arrives and then they wake up and have work to do. This setup seems inappropriate for a low traffic mailing list. For one thing the processes have a significant virtual memory footprint and my hosting service puts a max cap on virtual memory (which I know is stupid because it has no real impact on the host OS but it's what they do). For another thing because the list can be idle a long time, if something made the qrunner processes crash, then I don't notice and when someone does finally use the mailing list the message doesn't go through until they complain to me and I go restart mailman. That makes me think that for a very low traffic mailing list like mine, it would be more appropriate if I could get the Mailman daemons to operate similar to how an internet daemon operates when it is triggered by inetd instead of being a true daemon. (Most of the time it isn't even running at all and has zero footprint. Instead a much smaller much simpler daemon runs to watch for the type of activity that the bigger daemon should respond to, and when it happens it runs the bigger program to respond to just this one instance of activity, after which the bigger program will die and go away leaving just the little program to continue looking for further activity). This pattern adds the cost of extra lag to the response, but this buys you a lower footprint the rest of the time when it's idle, and it also buys you the ability to not have to constantly monitor to make sure that a process that hasn't had anything to do for a long time is still running. It would be wonderful if I could do a thing like that with qrunner. Is there an option that I can turn on somewhere that does this and I just can't find it in the documentation? If not I'll cobble together a small script that will look at Mailman's pending queue directory and when it starts having files in it, the script will run "/etc/init.d/mailman start", and when it has no files in it, it will run "/etc/init.d/mailman stop". It's a crude solution so I'd rather not use it if there's something more elegant built in to Mailman that I didn't notice. -- Steven L. Mading <madi...@gmail.com> ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
