Nelson Strother writes:
I did not intend to imply that
mailman start(predictably) consumes more time thanmailman restart. Both are lengthy and variable;
You did say something about "30min" I believe. I don't understand why it would take anywhere near that long. For example, I'm working with a site with ~20,000 lists, and it only takes a few seconds.
Oh ... wait ... are you using Postfix as the MTA? The supplied Postfix MTA interface rebuilds the list aliases database on every (re)start, and that's an O(#lists^2) process the way Mailman does it. Postfix doesn't actually use the file to route mail, it always goes to lmtp:127.0.01 or something like that. So I configured Postfix to probe for existence of the list in Mailman's database.
I think Postfix has plugins for all Mailman-supported databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL/MariaDB, SQLite3). I can provide the changes needed for this for PostgreSQL right away, if you're a MySQL site I can give you the PostgreSQL config to give you the idea, but I may be sslow if you want advice about the MySQL config. It's pretty straightforward, though.
I do not yet understand how to make use of these clues, but at least one can see an epitaph from each deceased process.
I don't understand them either. The only thing I can think of is that a runner may try to access Mailman core, timeout, and crash during the long startup.
At least the MTA reconfig would make the restart cycle a lot less painful. Note: this is NOT a Mailman-supported config (or even contrib quality) yet, but I'm pretty confident of the theory and it is working well in QA testing.
Regarding the "alpha" status of the config, one Mailman 3 instance can support multiple domains, but the Postfix docs say not to hit the database for the "domain exists" check. If you aren't going to add additional Mailman domains, then this doesn't matter (the domain list file produced by the stock Mailman postfix config will work), but if you do add or remove domains, you either need to configure Postfix to hit the database for the "domain exists" check too contrary to Postfix's advice, or you'd need to manage the domain list file by hand.
In any case, you could use this config for debugging, and go back to the tried and true aliases file approach for production. And as I indicated I'm somewhat available on a best-effort basis for trouble-shooting.