On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, David Woyciesjes wrote:
> Does anyone have any idea why it takes upwards of 15-20 minutes (seems
> longer sometimes) for my postings to this list to get sent back out?
The combination of Majordomo and Sendmail is notoriously slow at delivery
to large mailing lists. Majordomo's out-of-the-box setup is to delegate
all of the delivery hassle to Sendmail -- after deciding to forward a
given message to the list, it passes it to a Sendmail process along with a
list of all of the list's subscribers. The Sendmail processs then sorts
the recipients by their MX and runs through the list host by host, one
host at a time, until it's done with the delivery. If it takes a couple
of minutes to do a particular host delivery (i.e. that host is very slow
or it times out), that means that all the machines behind it on the list
are delayed by couple of minutes. The end result is that people at the
beginning of the list get quick turnaround times and people at the end of
the list get variable but generally much longer turnarounds.
Solutions to this problem are 1) not to care, 2) to switch from Sendmail
to a mail transport agent like Qmail or Postfix that parallelizes its
deliveries, 3) to switch from Majordomo to a mailing list manager that
either breaks deliveries into smaller chunks (LISTSERV) or handles
delivery on its own (Lyris), or 4) to patch Majordomo so that it sorts
recipient lists and breaks them into chunks before passing them on to
Sendmail. Majordomo 2.0, which is still not out of beta, does this out of
the box.
Many moons ago (almost 80?) I wrote a FAQ about all this stuff for
comp.mail.list-admin.software, and this particular section is still
relevant. It's at
http://www.docnorm.com/mlmfaq.
Norm Aleks
Received on Mon Sep 17 2001 - 01:23:26 BST