What is the listserver at hub.org doing?

Started by Oliver Elphickover 25 years ago4 messagesgeneral
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#1Oliver Elphick
olly@lfix.co.uk

When I got a new message from Tom Lane at 7:30am in England, I wondered
if he was working on PostgreSQL all night as well as all day, so I looked
at the mail headers and found he had posted in mid-evening his time but
the message had taken 6 hours to be forwarded.

I got curious about the delays in mail forwarding through the mailing
lists and looked at the headers of some messages (see below). It seems
that a message arrives at hub.org and then gets sat on for a few hours
before it is sent out again. Sometimes it does an internal loop and
gets sat on twice! (By comparison, the Debian listserver resends messages
within a minute.)

The result is that messages take a long time to get out on the mailing
list and so are answered unnecessarily by several people.

Why does this happen?

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--
Oliver Elphick Oliver.Elphick@lfix.co.uk
Isle of Wight http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver
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========================================
"If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a
branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast
them into the fire, and they are burned."
John 15:6

#2Tom Lane
tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us
In reply to: Oliver Elphick (#1)
Re: What is the listserver at hub.org doing?

"Oliver Elphick" <olly@lfix.co.uk> writes:

When I got a new message from Tom Lane at 7:30am in England, I wondered
if he was working on PostgreSQL all night as well as all day, so I looked
at the mail headers and found he had posted in mid-evening his time but
the message had taken 6 hours to be forwarded.

hub.org's mail forwarding has been seriously ill since about Monday...
the delays are not only much larger than normal, but wildly erratic
(anywhere from 1 to 6 hours, for messages posted at the same time!).

Dunno what Marc is doing about this, but I hope he gets it fixed soon.
It's a real PITA if you're trying to follow a discussion.

regards, tom lane

#3Ian Lance Taylor
ian@airs.com
In reply to: Oliver Elphick (#1)
Re: What is the listserver at hub.org doing?

Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 08:08:09 +0100
From: "Oliver Elphick" <olly@lfix.co.uk>

I got curious about the delays in mail forwarding through the mailing
lists and looked at the headers of some messages (see below). It seems
that a message arrives at hub.org and then gets sat on for a few hours
before it is sent out again. Sometimes it does an internal loop and
gets sat on twice! (By comparison, the Debian listserver resends messages
within a minute.)

The result is that messages take a long time to get out on the mailing
list and so are answered unnecessarily by several people.

Why does this happen?

We had these problems on sourceware.cygnus.com (now
sources.redhat.com), which was (and is) running a number of large
mailing lists. The problem was, in a word, sendmail. We fixed it by
switching to qmail (http://www.qmail.org/). Mail delivery on the
mailing lists dropped from hours to seconds.

Ian

#4The Hermit Hacker
scrappy@hub.org
In reply to: Ian Lance Taylor (#3)
Re: What is the listserver at hub.org doing?

uOn 27 Oct 2000, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2000 08:08:09 +0100
From: "Oliver Elphick" <olly@lfix.co.uk>

I got curious about the delays in mail forwarding through the mailing
lists and looked at the headers of some messages (see below). It seems
that a message arrives at hub.org and then gets sat on for a few hours
before it is sent out again. Sometimes it does an internal loop and
gets sat on twice! (By comparison, the Debian listserver resends messages
within a minute.)

The result is that messages take a long time to get out on the mailing
list and so are answered unnecessarily by several people.

Why does this happen?

We had these problems on sourceware.cygnus.com (now
sources.redhat.com), which was (and is) running a number of large
mailing lists. The problem was, in a word, sendmail. We fixed it by
switching to qmail (http://www.qmail.org/). Mail delivery on the
mailing lists dropped from hours to seconds.

the problem here, in two words, is "slashdot effect" ... one of our
clients sites became very popular the beginning of this week, and altho he
expected it, he didnt' forwarn us.

We have a new machien coming in to which we are moving all our mail
services, including the mailing lists, so that they are unaffected by web
traffic.