Developers of Sympa

[elijah <address@concealed>]

Olivier Salaün wrote:

> I've followed the track yourself and Sergiy explored, ie limiting the
> calls to List::get_lists() that browses the expl directory. I've just
> commited my changes to the development branch and noticed another
> significant improvement of performances in the same conditions I
> mentionned  in myprevious email, ie 10 consecutive access to the service
> homepage on a server with 800 mailing lists. The initial process time
> was 7.2 seconds ; I've now reached 1.8 seconds. It seems to be
> resonnable performances, unless yourself and Sergiy still have
> insufficient performances with many K lists. If you could have a try
> with the same profile procedure I used, see
> http://www.sympa.org/wiki/faq/performances ; I could thereby check that
> performances are now suitable.

I believe we have a miscommunication. The current performance of wwsympa
is O(n) where n is the number of lists. Unfortunately, it will not work
for us to have the time wwsympa takes to complete a request be
proportional to the number of lists, even if the execution time is very
small for a relatively high number of lists.

Some people might find 1.8 seconds acceptable for a page request, but
when you start hosting 20K lists the execution time will grow
unacceptably high so long as the process is still O(n).

Wwsympa should be able to support 100K lists, if the code is tweaked
along the lines suggested by Epsas and Sergiy.

Riseup.net is a non-profit organization that hosts lists for other
non-profit organizations. We are working with Epsas to allow us to
continue using sympa. We are a small volunteer organization, and we do
not have the resources to maintain a forked version of sympa. For this
reason, we hope and pray that the performance improvements suggested by
Epsas and Sergiy will be accepted as part of the main sympa distribution.

thank you,
-elijah