Re: [cobalt-users] RaQs and mailing lists

[Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 06:58 PM 3/2/00 -0600, you wrote:
> Approximately how many email addresses in a "mailing list" can the RaQ 
> handle before the server goes takes a dive from the load?

I wouldn't run a list of more than a few thousand on Majordomo, but only 
because the address list itself becomes difficult to manage.

To quote from a BSDI brochure back in the days when 100 mhz 486 systems 
were fast:  A computer running BSDI can easily saturate a T-1 line.

Majordomo isn't the most efficient list server, but it's not bad.

Of course at least some of this depends on how many different domains 
you're mailing to; it takes much longer to send 1,000 emails to 1,000 
different mailservers than it does to send them to one mailserver.  It also 
depends on how long a delay you'd accept in delivery.

There's a switch available in Majordomo to tell it to stop sending messages 
when machine load gets too high; you might want to set that if you have 
enough addresses to really slow down a system.

We host lists professionally, and we use majordomo.  Some of our clients 
share program files, others have custom modifications and their own copies 
of majordomo.

> Interested in some stats...for instance, limitation on a RaQ1, RaQ2, or 
> RaQ3...and how much ram on board.

Shouldn't matter much which system; as I've mentioned above, processor 
speed isn't near as important as connection speed.  The RaQ1 and RaQ2 are 
both running Red Hat 5.2, I believe, and on MIPS architecture.  The RaQ3 
runs on Intel architecture.  I don't deploy systems under 128 mb; memory is 
quite important in Linux/Unix software architecture.

> I'm wondering because there are so any web hosts that don't allow users to 
> send bulk email through mailing lists scripts.  I guess I'd like to know 
> why they don't and what these can do to a server.

Most of them don't because they're afraid you'll use the list to spam.  On 
lists being transferred to us, we look at the lists posts for a while and 
we can see if it's spam or not.  On new lists we do limit the number of 
people that can be added each day until we know the list.  We price lists 
based on whether they're announcement lists, light discussion lists or 
unlimited discussion lists, and on the number of subscribers, in small 
increments up to 1,000, and then per 1,000 after that.

Perhaps some companies don't like high-volume lists because they don't 
understand the loads lists put on servers, or because they don't want to 
dedicate servers just to lists.

Jeff

--
Jeff Lasman <jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>