Paul Tomblin via Mailman-users writes:
First time running runjobs monthly since I installed it a few days ago, and it's been maxing out I/O for the last 8 hours. There doesn't appear to be any logging going on. I am using Xapian, by the way.
Is this normal? Is this going to happen every month, or is the first month special?
Full-text indexing is a pretty slow operation, and it's I/O bound. If you've migrated a substantial archive, that will be a full-archive index. Anyway, my experience is that for a multi-terabyte archive on a 4 vCPU 16 GB dedicated Linode it was still chugging away a couple weeks later, using all the I/O it could. (The client said "OK, we're satisfied, we'll call if there are problems" before it completed. It may still be at it for all I know. :-)
I think that normally there's a partial reindex once a month (because of the asynchronous nature of email, referenced messages can appear after the current message gets indexed). But if you didn't manually trigger a full archive index at the initial migration, the first monthly will do the whole thing. Unless you're literally archiving terabytes per month, later monthlies should take much less time (but they'll use all the I/O you give them). I don't think Xapian allows you to throttle the indexer, and I don't think any shell's ulimit can throttle I/O, but I gather the Linux kernel can do it to some extent.
Steve
-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan