The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Aumont - Comite Reseaux des Universites <address@concealed>]

Alfonso Marín Marín wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm administrating a Sympa server, and i have a problem: our major 
> list is the student one, with around 30000 subscribers. When we send a 
> message to this list, sympa takes a lot of time to distribute it, and 
> i want optimize it.
>
> We are using the MTA sendmail, and I'm thinking to increase the 
> 'maxsmtp' parameter (now it has the default value, 25), but i don't 
> know if this is the better way, and I'd like to know if there are oters.
>
> All the subscriber share the same domain ( @alu.um.es)

Yes it is a good trick, but use 3 parameters : 
maxsmtp : You can try maxsmtp 300 or even more but the limit is 
depending on the memory availible : if sympa run to many sendmail, the 
server may swap. If you want to make the distribution faster you need 
then to make each sendmail process live in memory for a short time. This 
can be done adding à sendmail argument that tell to sendmail to spool 
message immediatly without trying to start a SMTP session or you can 
start sendmail with some short time-out. Later sendmail spooler will use 
normal time-out.

nrcpt : You also must look at nrcpt parameter and increase that one too. 
nrcpt is the number of receipient for each sendmail processus. If you 
increase this parameter Sympa needs lower number of sendmail call. The 
limit is not clear because if each sendmail processus is more 
complicated they use more system ressources.


distribution_mode : using "distribution_mode fork" Sympa will fork, one 
process will process commands (subscription, etc) and message forwarding 
(message transmited to ist editor) and the child process will be 
dedicated to distribution process. It is very interesting because this 
way new incomming messages don't way the distribution process before 
being served.


Serge Aumont

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