Developers of Sympa

[Thomas Berry <address@concealed>]

Sympa version 5.3.2 on Red Hat EL4 update 4

 This is part of my continuing saga dealing with a distribution of 7600 
subscribed members that is taking 45-60 minutes for Sympa to complete.   
Another list of 440 messages took 95 minutes to complete, while smaller 
lists take only a few seconds to complete.

 Today, I setup Sympa so that its call to sendmail would queue the 
messages locally.  I setup queue runner sendmail process to deliver the 
messages from the local queue. (Sendmail is configured with a smart host 
so that it delivers to a cluster of MTAs on our domain).  The 
interesting part of this is that Sympa only took 20 seconds to complete 
this distribution in our development environment running the same Sympa 
and sendmail configuration, Sympa and OS release, and a list with the 
same list of members exported from the mailing list in production.

 During the distribution, top shows the load average at about .15; over 
600MB out of 2GB of free memory; and a very low IO wait.

 Note that the sympa-distribute process that writes the message file 
takes several minutes for each message to complete: "write(11, " 
\nScience activities concluded w"..., 2265) = 2265".  Also of note, once 
Sympa finished generating the messages for this distribution, the 
messages that were queued up behind it distributed rather quickly with 
no signs of delay.  I've also done SQL and LDAP tests which show no 
signs of delays (From what I know about Sympa, interactions with LDAP 
and SQL have completed before the distribution process starts generating 
messages).

 I've asked this before, but I'm getting desperate trying to find out 
why the production system isn't performing anywhere near as efficiently 
as the development server (both environments use the hardware).


 Here's a sample of strace output from the sympa-distribute process 
while it was constructing the messages for the distribution.  Maybe 
someone can glean some information from it.

--- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 297000}) = 0 (Timeout)
write(11, "Received: from mail.jpl.nasa.gov"..., 4096) = 4096
write(11, " \nScience activities concluded w"..., 2265) = 2265
close(11)                               = 0
pipe([10, 11])                          = 0
ioctl(10, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, 0xbffbaf58) = -1 EINVAL 
(Invalid argument)
_llseek(10, 0, 0xbffbaf90, SEEK_CUR)    = -1 ESPIPE (Illegal seek)
ioctl(11, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, 0xbffbaf58) = -1 EINVAL 
(Invalid argument)
_llseek(11, 0, 0xbffbaf90, SEEK_CUR)    = -1 ESPIPE (Illegal seek)
fcntl64(10, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC)        = 0
fcntl64(11, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC)        = 0
clone(child_stack=0, 
flags=CLONE_CHILD_CLEARTID|CLONE_CHILD_SETTID|SIGCHLD, 
child_tidptr=0xb7fa8708) = 23853
--- SIGCHLD (Child exited) @ 0 (0) ---
close(10)                               = 0
select(0, NULL, NULL, NULL, {0, 299999}) = 0 (Timeout)
write(11, "Received: from mail.jpl.nasa.gov"..., 4096) = 4096
write(11, " \nScience activities concluded w"..., 2265



Here's the sympa log event that shows the distribution completed:

Sep  4 14:58:46 list sympa(message)[20483]: main::DoMessage() Message 
for cassini from address@concealed accepted (2790 seconds, 59 
sessions, 7695 subscribers), 
message-id=<p06230916c4e5fa93c13c@[137.78.239.39]> , size=6114