> On Thu, 18 Feb 1999 13:40:48 +0000 (GMT), Thomas Anderson writes:
Not really.
Long winded and technical discussion of latency in an email environment coming
up. Please delete if the thought of geeking about email doesn't thrill you to
the bone.
In a straight up majordomo environment, majordomo does all the funky list
bits, then effectively hands the message to sendmail with a long list of
people to deliver it to. Sendmail does some sorting on this list, but not
alot. It then starts trying to deliver the email to the first person, then the
next, etc.
This means that if you're at the bottom of the list, it could be quite some
time before it even tries to deliver to you. Depending on how many people
above you there are, and the timeouts taken for unresponsive sites.
The modification that just went into effect splits this big group of names
into lots of smaller groups, and sorts by domain, before handing it off to
sendmail. This means everyone at yahoo.com for example gets delivered in one
batch for example. And the longest you have to wait is the length of one of
these smaller chunks. The possible disadvantages to doing this are increased
load spikes on the mailing list machine as it tries to deliver everything in
parallel. But, since most of the deliveries should be quick, overall it may
lower the load as only a few sendmail's hang on delivering slow email, instead
of most of them.
This really points out the two kinds of delay. There's the delay in seeing
your own messages echo'd back from the list. This is purely a your local
system, i.e. how long does it take mail to get to you. Then there's a problem
of seeing replies to your message before getting the message back. This shows
that you are really far down on the list, as before the message tries to get
to you, its been received by others and responded to. The goal is to reduce
the turn time to you by enough that this won't happen.
Not real exact I know, but I don't want to get into total specifics unless
there's a sendmail guru on the list who wants to debate these things.:)
> Then there's a problem of seeing replies to your message before
So that's what has been happening to me - especially the last week or
so.
Usually I read 3-4 responses before the original....Very enlightening.
thanks for the brief description, as well as your efforts at modifying it (and
of course the whole job of hosting the list, too!)
I never thought the list process was so complex! Thanks for explaining.
If the List Server is doing all that, with the smaller lists and all. What is
that you do as a list sysop? Do you have to read every email to stop the spam,
ect?
Fasinated by computers...
> On Fri, 19 Feb 1999 01:01:40 -0500, Donald Hosford writes:
What is
> that
If I had to read every message before you all saw it, this list would have
MUCH less traffic than it does, and there's no way I could run 5 main lists
and a bunch of related lists.
So, what do I do anyway? Well, for those who want to know, here it is:
First, I got the machine, network bandwidth, disk space, etc to run the list.
Not to hard to do in this day and age, but an important
thing non-the-less. Actually, I'm sort of the mailing list master for
the machine the list is run off of, so I sort of trade some of my time setting
up lists for other people for the space we all use to talk about games.
Second, and probably the biggest thing, is that I regularly look through the
10,000 or so bounce messages I get a week and unsubscribe people from the
lists. People do NOT tend to remember to unsub when they loose accounts.
Mailing those people generates bounce messages which come to me, and every
once in a while (weekly generally) I spend an hour and unsub people who are
bouncing email.
Third, I do maintain spam filters which are pretty darn good I think. About
the only spam that gets through is operator error type stuff. The trouble is,
some legit posts get caught in these filters, so I need to forward them on to
the list with approved headers so they can actually be disted out. Almost all
of this is automated, but I still have to say thumbs up or down on each caught
message. Takes a couple of minutes a day generally.
Fourth, every once in a while I have to step in and try to reign in an unruly
discussion on a list, or tell people posting in MIME not to, or some other
list admin only type thing. Not fun, but part of the responsibility of running
a list. This list is truly amazing how LITTLE I have to do that on, but not
all lists are so great that way.
Last, I monitor the groups that discuss the mailing list package I use
(majordomo) for updates, bug fixes, new features, etc. Happens very rarely,
but can take a day of messing with when it does happen.
There, thats a rough summary. There may well be some things I've forgotten or
skipped over, but those are the main points. Isn't it amazing how much goes on
behind the scene's sometimes?
Thanks for the info! You are a busy dude!
Donald Hosford
> Matthew Seidl wrote:
> On Fri, 19 Feb 1999 01:01:40 -0500, Donald Hosford writes:
What is
> > that
(Snippage!)
> There, thats a rough summary. There may well be some things I've