Oracle-L list peformance

List,

This is the text of an email from Bruce Bergman, owner and operator of fatcity.com, the ISP that this list runs on.

I had asked him about a number of my posts to the list that had been rejected due to a'locking problem'.

If you're up to using the list as a test lab for this with a payoff of improved performance and fewer problems with rejected posts, please let me know. Keep reading!

You can let me know by sending an email to jkstill_at_cybcon.com with one of the following subject lines:

Oracle-l guinea pig: yes
Oracle-l guinea pig: no

Case doesn't count, formatting does. If the subject doesn't look exactly like that, it won't count. It also must be to me by midnight, Pacific Standard Time on February 6th.

Jared

>From Bruce Bergman:

I've been meaning to write to you on something related to this subject, so now seems like a good time. :-)

Unfortunately, I'm aware of this issue. :-( These locking instances occur because of a bug in the SMTP software I'm using to pull in mail. If an incoming destination address exceeds 2047 characters in length (i.e., a spammer is sending to every mailing list I run in one message), the software dies and refuses to pick up mail until the offending message is deleted.

I've talked to the software vendor but they aren't making any fixes any longer (it's an old, free package), so I'm out of luck there. I wrote a perl script to catch the failures and then go out and find the offending message and delete it, and while that is taking place (it's a fair bit of trickery to go find it and nuke it), I shunt mail to my backup mail server.
If a couple of spam messages occur in quick succession (as they are prone to do), this means I have to repeat this process again each time. The backup server sends the message below to users telling them to retry the message in a few minutes, under the assumption that it will resolve itself

soon.

The problem is that the spammers (who are the ones exceeding 2047 characters) are hitting hard lately. About 1 in 150 messages I get are spam, and this locking problem rears its head about 3-4 times a day. All told, we probably get 300-500 spam messages per day, destined for various addresses. The day before yesterday this clog hit 11 times. Hence your chances of getting that locking message are greater during times like that.

The good news is that I have a real solution on the backup server, but it is not able to handle the full load of the mailing lists yet. I need to find a lull in traffic (usually around holidays) and switch over during that
time.

And in fact, one of the things I need to do prior to that is to test this out on a high-traffic list, so maybe oracle-L might be willing to be a guinea pig?? ;-) The penalty is that the traffic might be shaky/disturbed during this test period, but the reward is that if this works, I won't have this locking problem AND the response time to list traffic should be up
into the range of less than five minutes.

How comfortable are you with offering up your list as a test bed? If you don't want to, that's fine too -- I can probably try it out on a few of the ODTUG lists. Your call. Let me know.

thanks,
bruce

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Author: 
  INET: Jared.Still_at_radisys.com

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