Re: Huge amounts of resources

[Matti Aarnio <mea@nic.funet.fi>]

> Hello all,
> 
> I've just installed Zmailer 2.99.47 on a pentium 75 machine with 32 MB Ram
> running linux 1.2.13. The problem is that Zmailer take huge amounts of
> resources when processing a mailing list with 30.000 subscribers. The load
> average is 32 and the swap-file usage is something like 60 MB's. The
> machine is also running an ftp-deamon with 50 concurent logins. Has anybody
> an idee how to restrict zmailer ?

	There are many ways on how to do it in scheduler, but which is your
	problem ?  Huge router processes, or too many transporters ?

	Anyway, the ZMailer is not very good at expanding HUGE lists,
	a few hundred, or a few thousand will work fine, but tens of
	thousands is way too much in alias-like expansion.

	There is a program   utils/listexpand.c  which may help you.
	It is intended to be run at a pipe from 'aliases'.
	Program called "SmartLists" (I think it was) is able to sort,
	and split the list of addresses into smaller bits, which
	definitely will help at the routing phase.
 
	Depending on how many messages per day you want to send thru,
	you MAY be able to get it to run on this small a machine, but
	to give any real recommendations I would need more details about
	your lists -- how many addresses per list ?  How many messages
	per list per day ?

	I would suggest that your machine should have at least 128 MB
	RAM -- a server like yours with less memory is really seriously
	undersized.

	Oh yes, you will also need my pre-release edition of ZMailer.
	It has several bugfixes in it which improve on  smtp transporter
	reliability.  Though I need to verbosify some aspects of the
	log reporting -- right now I don't always know (from the log) WHY
	some message is being reprocessed again and again..
	(One case was a timeout error at DNS query for the target, and
	 of course the message was just logged accepted for processing
	 without details on what was done to it..  The scheduler gets
	 "timeout on DNS query" report, though.)
	(Pre-releases are at: ftp://mea.tmt.tele.fi/ )

> Kind regards,
> 	Micha Kersloot

	/Matti Aarnio <mea@nic.funet.fi>