Re: List processing capacity (was Re: Community Feedback: Turning off monthly IETF mailing list password reminder emails)

[Chris Griffiths <[e-mail]>]

On Nov 4, 2013, at 9:52 AM, Dave Crocker <[e-mail]> 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