Re: Questions re Zmail

[Christoph Lameter <clameter@waterf.org>]

On Mon, 19 May 1997, Andy Poling wrote:

>On Mon, 19 May 1997, Christoph Lameter wrote:
>> 1. What is this "Timeserver" and why does it garble the ps line?
>> 
>> 11831  ?  S      0:00 /usr/lib/zmailer/router -dkn 4 
>> 11836  ?  S      0:04 /usr/lib/zmailer/scheduler -l /var/log/mail/scheduler.perflog -S -H 
>> 11837  ?  S      0:00 TimeServer ailer/scheduler -l /var/log/mail/scheduler.perflog -S -H 
>> 11838  ?  S      0:00 /usr/lib/zmailer/router -dkn 4 
>> 11839  ?  S      0:00 /usr/lib/zmailer/router -dkn 4 
>
>It is responsible for serving the current date/time.  I guess the idea is
>that, at maximum, one gettimeofday() per second will occur due to the
>scheduler.  On a busy mail system it could be a significant win.

Why would a daemon be more efficient than the kernel code?

Also I am running xntp on that host. The kernel time is really accurate.
The "TimeServer" is useless AFAIK.

>It's all a matter of how much memory the router process will use when
>processing a message to the list.  A longer list = more memory needed.  The
>actual list expansion isn't a problem - just the size of the router while
>processing a large number of addresses in one message.  Thus an external
>list expander (especially one written in an interpreted language) is not
>likely to help things.

How much memory does it need for 10.000 adresses?

>Incidentally, my (Slackware) Linux mail system running Zmailer is delivering
>messages to an average (over the last 3 days, which have been relatively
>quiet) of 60-70k recipients per day (mostly the Miata mailing list) without
>a hitch.  Until very recently, I delivered this volume with a P90 with 80MB
>of memory.  Your 150MHz Cyrix CPU might be sufficient, but 16MB of RAM is
>probably too skimpy for serious work like this with any MTA.

16M is just fine for an exploder with 60k messages. There is already a
problem with the syslogd getting to be a bottleneck which will not be
affected by adding memory. I am not planning to run those huge mailing
lists off the exploder. Thanks for the tips. We better stuff 128M or so
into the mailing list host then.

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