The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Olivier Salaun <address@concealed>]

Harald Wilhelmi wrote:

> at the moment I'm evaluating mailing list solutions for a
> large intranet. The scenario looks roughly like that:
> 
>         40000 users
>         4000 mailing lists
> 
> The biggest problem with the old system (hacked Majordomo+home-brewed
> Web interface) is slow operation of certain admin tasks in the
> web interface. It's believed that this is just caused by the fact
> that UNIX file systems need sequential searchs to find files in
> large directories (with 4000 entries...). If that's the problem Sympa
> might have the same problem. However I believe that there must be more
> because this data should be quite well chached (I-node cache + name cache).
> 
> My Sympa installations were a lot smaller so far.
> Has anyone experiences with Sympa in installations of this size?
> Esspecially concerning performances of the web interface?

I did experimentations on our dev. server with 4 000 and 40 000 lists ;
there were all identical lists, pointing to the same config file :
(our server is a PIII 730 MHz, mem=263Mb, SCSI disks)

* with 4 000 lists
        Everything works at usual speed for all web functions including
        the WHICH function that goes trough all lists to parse config
        files.

* with 40 000 lists 
        Every operation concerning a single lists (INFO, ADMIN, REVIEW,...) 
works as 
        fast as usual. BUT 'WHICH' operation (searching all subscriptions for 
a user)
        is really too slow.


Though, we are interested in experiences of sites running Sympa with 
thousands of
MLs and related performences.

Thanks

--
Olivier Salaün
Comité Réseau des Universités