[Mailman-Users] List performance and server size
Hi everyone, I'm considering Mailman and I have been reading the FAQ and archives in search of an answer to my questions. I didn't have much luck and thought I would ask here. I have a client who needs to send out about 50,000 emails once a month via a one-way list. I'm considering installing Mailman on a Dell server with a 2.8 ghz Xeon processor, 1 GB ram and one 160 GB SATA IDE Hard drive. The OS would be FreeBSD. I'm not terribly strong in 'nix but I do have some experience with OpenBSD and I'm generally good at figuring out new things. Does anyone foresee any performance problems with my configuration? Will I have a lot of trouble installing Mailman on FreeBSD versus some other OS? Thanks for your help! -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=showamp;file=faq01.027.htp
Re: [Mailman-Users] List performance and server size
At 11:03 AM -0500 2005-07-13, Dave Beckstrom wrote: I'm considering Mailman and I have been reading the FAQ and archives in search of an answer to my questions. I didn't have much luck and thought I would ask here. Hmm. That's a bad sign. Did you search the Mailman FAQ Wizard for performance? I have a client who needs to send out about 50,000 emails once a month via a one-way list. I'm considering installing Mailman on a Dell server with a 2.8 ghz Xeon processor, 1 GB ram and one 160 GB SATA IDE Hard drive. The OS would be FreeBSD. I'm not terribly strong in 'nix but I do have some experience with OpenBSD and I'm generally good at figuring out new things. Does anyone foresee any performance problems with my configuration? Will I have a lot of trouble installing Mailman on FreeBSD versus some other OS? For large mailing lists, RAM is a critical limiting factor, to a point. Whether or not your system will have enough RAM is hard to say. I'd be inclined to start with more, if possible. But it may turn out that you don't need all that RAM. This is one of those things where you take a guess (and you usually try to guess conservatively), and if things are obviously too bad then you revise the system configuration upward from there. After RAM, the next most important limiting factor is the disk I/O subsystem. On a busy server, ATA or EIDE drives do not cut the mustard -- not even SATA is good enough. You need SCSI. Not even with an intelligent drive controller will ATA or EIDE cut the mustard -- you need SCSI. An intelligent SCSI controller will be an improvement over standard SCSI drives, especially if you can configure it for a large amount of battery-backed write-back cache, and the drive array itself in a striped/striped or plaid RAID-1+0 configuration. The only question here is whether or not your system will be so busy that the ATA drives hurt you by so much that you are forced to replace them. It's impossible to answer that question a priori -- you may have to try it and find out. If at all possible, I would recommend replacing the drives in this configuration with SCSI, but that may not be possible. You're also going to need an improved filesystem, and FreeBSD is a good choice here, with more recent versions having soft updates enabled by default. You also need an MTA configured for maximum performance. It is possible to configure sendmail to extremely high levels of performance, but it takes a lot of work to do, and takes a fair amount of management to keep it there. Postfix works pretty well out-of-the-box for small to medium size lists, and there are a lot of knobs you can tune for further performance on larger lists. Operating system wise, I believe that FreeBSD is a good choice. It is my preferred choice, but of course that's a personal preference. One thing you generally don't need on a large mailing list server is CPU. Boxes with very slow CPUs but well-designed I/O subsystems will run circles around boxes with much faster CPUs but less well designed I/O subsystems. The problem is that pretty much all this information is already in the FAQ, with further information in the archives. So, if you searched for performance and you didn't find it then there is a bigger problem. -- Brad Knowles, [EMAIL PROTECTED] Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755 SAGE member since 1995. See http://www.sage.org/ for more info. -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=showamp;file=faq01.027.htp
Re: [Mailman-Users] List performance and server size
Dave Beckstrom wrote: I have a client who needs to send out about 50,000 emails once a month via a one-way list. The unmentioned things here are, how fast to the emails have to leave the server and reach the users and how large are the emails? If the emails are relatively small, even a DSL line could get the emails out in a reasonable time frame. If they are large, and you have to get them out quickly, you could have some bandwidth issues. While 50,000 emails sounds like a lot, the fact you're only sending one email a month means you are probably wasting money throwing a mega server at it. I'm considering installing Mailman on a Dell server with a 2.8 ghz Xeon processor, 1 GB ram and one 160 GB SATA IDE Hard drive. The OS would be FreeBSD. At this time, I'm using a 733 pentium III with a 40gig ATA drive and 384 megs of ram. Its running FreeBSD 4.8, and it is running IPFW, NATD, DHCPD, NTPD, Squid, Apache, Postfix, and Mailman. It's hosting about 12 web sites (some of which are pretty active) and 15 mailing lists ranging from small to large (about 1,000), with activity all over the place. Most of the lists are interactive, not announcement lists. No performance issues. 15 mb of ram is still free, and only 147K of swap space has ever been used. We're using a slow 256kbps DSL line. The big hit is when on the first of the month all our subscribers get their Mailman reminders. The queue is clear before I get into the office at 8:00 AM. Mailman and Postfix installed pretty cleanly from the ports collection. I think in your shoes, I'd do a test run on a more modest server and see what the performance is like, and then look at where the actual bottlenecks are. FreeBSD is pretty friendly about being moved from one machine to another... just put your hard drive into a faster machine, make sure they have the same NIC and you can probably be running without having to change anything. I honestly suspect that your real performance hit will be list aging. From what I've read and seen, most lists, if they aren't maintained, have about 10% of their addresses go stale every month. That means you'll get about 5,000 bounces the first month. And handling bounces is a waste of bandwidth and system resources. I'd make sure you turn on VERP and prune aggressively. With only one mail going out a month, you have to use fairly aggressive pruning settings or the bad addresses will never age out. Look at the FAQs to see how to make Mailman work with your MTA and VERP. It took me about 1/2 a day with Postfix. (Because the system works so well, I don't have to tweak it often, so, despite using FreeBSD for years and years and the Mailman/Postfix combination for years, I'm still a perpetual newbie in FreeBSD, Mailman, and Postfix.) Mike -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=showamp;file=faq01.027.htp
