[ZWeb] "NZO box" on front page

Andrew Sawyers andrew at zope.com
Fri Aug 20 11:13:24 EDT 2004


Tim Peters wrote:
  > Probably best if you resend it.  When mail.python.org and 
mail.zope.org got
> divorced, it looks like m.p.o got custody of the children (i.e., m.p.o has
> gotten much better and m.z.o remained flakey).
mail.zope.org is not exactly "flakey" -- mailman gets hungup on 
attempting to resend to failed deliveries (over and over and over).  It 
appears, as mailman runs it's outrunner, it goes over the list of 
outfiles in the same order everytime, and gets tied up wasting time 
trying to resend to failed deliveries (most of these are for domain 
unknown).  The failure of this is a 450, which is try again later.  I've 
looked to find a way to have this return a 550, but I cannot find a way 
to do that.  Due to the behavior of mailman, it spends most of it's time 
attempting to redeliver these (~550 at the moment).  We tried upping the 
number of outrunner threads from the default of 1 which is way too low - 
and this worked initially to clean out good deliveries, but then due to 
the way mailman tries to lock the out files it gets itself into a 
tailspin and loads down the server.  We were able to keep good mail 
running through with 15 outrunners, but then when all the good mail was 
delivered the system would spiral into huge loads (27+) with mailman 
swallowing up the server.  I reduced these down to 5 outrunners, and the 
tailspin (when it happens) isn't as bad - but it is loading the server 
up as mailman contends and throws errors off locks and missing delivered 
outfiles.

That said, I'm not sure the behavior of mailman if it's trying to send 
out a large number of recipients in a single delivery to the mta - where 
it fails due to the non-existent domains and all deliveries fail or what 
it's behavior is.  I also do not know if mailman has a knob like postfix 
to kick failed deliveries out after a set time period.  I thought 
mailman was supposed to remove these addresses from the lists?  Right 
now, I see two huge offenders, but have no idea what list they are on or 
I'd go remove them manually.

Since I don't have the time to figure out mailman to this degree and no 
obvious hits have come up from googling.  Both Jens and I have spent 
time trying to fix this; but IMNSHO the problem is mailman or our lack 
of knowing how to tweak it.  If anyone knows the right tweaks to make, 
I'd be glad to fix it since I believe I know what the problem is.

Andrew
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Zope-web maillist  -  Zope-web at zope.org
> http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-web


-- 
Zope Corporation
Software Engineer
(540) 361-1700


More information about the Zope-web mailing list