The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Luca Maranzano <address@concealed>]

Hello all,

we are testing Sympa for its LDAP features, but we are having some
problems with long LDAP include, i.e. about 4000 subscribers.

First of all our setup:

2 PentiumII, Debian Linux woody, Kernel 2.4.10
Sympa version 3.2.1 (Debian pakcage)
Perl v5.6.1
perl-ldap-0.2401 (latest from CPAN)
Apache 1.3.20
Fast CGI 2.2.10 enabled 

We have tryed to configure a list with 5 subscribers via LDAP and
all works fine; then we tryed a list with 50 subscribers and
all works fine. With a list of almost 4000 subscribers we have the
folloing symptoms:

Accessing via Web sometimes is very slow, it seems that Sympa is
updating the list of the subscribers in its (memory?) cache, and so
we have configured mod_fastcgi with the following:

FastCgiServer /usr/lib/cgi-bin/sympa/wwsympa.fcgi -processes 2 \
-idle-timeout 120

to avoid the "Internal Server Error" due to the timeout.

The ttl in the config file for the list is the default 3600 secs.

It seems that sometime accessing the home page of /wws (and not
the list specific page) sympa wants to refetch the list of subscribers
for all the lists, and this should explain the timeout.

Using the command "sympa --dump=list" where "list" is the name
of the 4000 subscribers list it takes about 50 seconds to execute;
using a Perl script and making the same query it takes about the
same amount of time, so I think it is not a Sympa related issue,
but our question is:

having lot of lists (from 50 to 100) configured to make LDAP query
and some being possibly huge with thousands of members, can Sympa
manage this load and can be usable through the Web interface?

The caching of the LDAP query is done only for the Web Interface, right?

Supposing that the huge lists contains data that don't change quite
often, putting a TTL to 86400 seconds (1 day) should improve things?

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Regards,
Luca