The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Elijah Saxon <address@concealed>]

Hi all,

We have run into a bit of a problem with wwsympa. With three thousand
lists, the caching of all the configs into memory is becoming a problem:
it takes over 20 minutes to start up and would quickly eat up all memory
if we did not restart them every night (although related, this might be
more to do with the rumor of a memory leak). The server is 1.7 ghz, 1 gig
memory. Also, it would be quite nice to be able to kick apache without
creating 20 minutes of down time.

So I would like to write a patch for wwsympa which did not load the
configs into memory. Before I begin, I have a few questions:

1) should I bother? is this totally insane?
2) what features would I lose? I assume I would then have to
   pre-render the directory of lists, come up with a new way
   to approve pending lists and remove closed lists, and do without
   searching by admin email address on the sympa admin page.
   If that is all, it seems like a small price to pay. But maybe
   there are some really important reasons to have the configs in memory.
   I guess at a minimum, each list name and subject should be in memory
   so that you can find lists by searching.
3) what areas of the code should I look at to do this?
4) does it take long enough to load each config that it would
   be prohibitively slow to attempt to parse the file each time it is
   needed? would a pool of recently loaded configs be the best way to go?

-elijah