Re: What is the listserver at hub.org doing?

uOn 27 Oct 2000, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

>    Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 08:08:09 +0100
>    From: "Oliver Elphick" <olly@lfix.co.uk>
>
>    I got curious about the delays in mail forwarding through the mailing
>    lists and looked at the headers of some messages (see below).  It seems
>    that a message arrives at hub.org and then gets sat on for a few hours
>    before it is sent out again.  Sometimes it does an internal loop and
>    gets sat on twice!  (By comparison, the Debian listserver resends messages
>    within a minute.)
>
>    The result is that messages take a long time to get out on the mailing
>    list and so are answered unnecessarily by several people.
>
>    Why does this happen?
>
> We had these problems on sourceware.cygnus.com (now
> sources.redhat.com), which was (and is) running a number of large
> mailing lists.  The problem was, in a word, sendmail.  We fixed it by
> switching to qmail (http://www.qmail.org/).  Mail delivery on the
> mailing lists dropped from hours to seconds.

the problem here, in two words, is "slashdot effect" ... one of our
clients sites became very popular the beginning of this week, and altho he
expected it, he didnt' forwarn us.

We have a new machien coming in to which we are moving all our mail
services, including the mailing lists, so that they are unaffected by web
traffic.