The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Olivier Salaün - CRU <address@concealed>]

Patrick von der Hagen wrote:

[...]
  

The queue processing deals with messages priorities (defined on a per 
list basis). This is very time consuming because after each message has 
been processed, sympa.pl scans the spool again to find out about new files.
    

Hm. Does sympa start from scratch on every scan, so it processes every
file again and finally select just one message, or does it keep a list
of files in memory which is only updated during each scan?
  

(b) : It processes every file again and just selects one

Are there any other criteria involved, besides priority? E.g. "messages
in spool with highest priority are processed first, ordered by arrival"
or something like that?
  

You're right : I forgot to mention that, given the same priority, oldest messages are processed first.

The process could be optimized if sympa.pl scans its spool once only. 
But currently you'd have to patch sympa.pl.
    

So I could try to do something like "select the most urgent 10% of
spool-messages and process all of them before doing the next check of
the incoming-spool" or I might create an additional spool for each
priority, moving messages from the incoming spool to the priority spools
once, so sympa has to do less continuous calculations.
Some loop like 
"
frequency = take_from_sympa.conf
while true do
    distribute incoming-spool to priority-spools
    for up to frequency messages do
        process message which has highest priority
    done
done"

Sheduling is very tricky business.... :-(
  

In the past, the list priority was defined in aliases file (as a parameter to queue program) but we changed this to a) ease customization via Sympa web interface b) make it possible to change list prioritie on th fly.

We might introduce a new sympa.conf parameter that would have a logic much more basic than what you describe, ie a parameter to either fully disable priority usage or to make sympa.pl process all listed files in the msg/ spool at once.