On Nov 4, 2013, at 9:52 AM, Dave Crocker <dhc(_at_)dcrocker(_dot_)net> wrote:
On 11/2/2013 5:19 PM, Chris Griffiths wrote:
Due to an ever increasing community size as well as new mailing lists being
added to the mailman servers over time, we see a large amount of mail at the
beginning of every month that is causing some delays to email delivery
during this time period in order to send out mass email subscription and
password reminders to the community.
Chris,
Independent of whether reminders should default to off, your note ought to
raise a question about IETF-run list operations processing capacity.
The monthly reminder's capacity load is the same as having every mailing list
get one posting (and yes, probably at the same time.)
No matter what size our mailing lists are or how many we run, by current
measures of common Internet email volume, the aggregate load for the IETF
would normally be considered pretty small. Perhaps some tens of thousands of
messages.
If our current system configuration can't handle that easily, it probably
needs to get fixed. (There was supposed to be an IAOC effort to move towards
a more scalable operation, but I believe that stalled.)
Dave,
I completely agree with your statements on capacity planning, and a plan is
moving forward and is a priority for the team running it and we are tracking
milestones and deliverables on these plans in the IAOC. We are also discussing
options and additional actions to continue to boost capacity and/or
availability of IETF specific platforms which we will share transparently with
the community as those discussions and plans are proposed.
The specifics to capacity and monitoring for platforms like Mailman are fairly
complex beyond simply sending bulk emails since there are a number of factors
at play prior to even sending the bulk emails monthly which I agree are not a
significant in number from a sender sense. There is significant overhead
monthly to the system in order generate the emails for each user and reference
each mail list they are subscribed which is where one focus is to reduce this
current impact on system resources, and I agree this is only part of the needed
assessment and not a sliver bullet to deal with capacity.
Thank you
Chris
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