[Savannah-hackers] solution to SLOW mailing list performance

[Jonathan Walther]

Ever since the worm started hitting the net a couple weeks ago, it has
taken several days for messages to the mailing list to get sent out.
This is deadly to a Free Software project; really puts a crimp in
things.

I read the Mailman FAQ and found the following thing, which may well
speed up message delivery and solve peoples complaints:

    Q. I'm getting really terrible performance for outgoing messages.
    It seems that if the MTA has trouble resolving DNS for any
    recipients, qrunner just gets really slow clearing the queue. Any
    ideas?

    A. What's likely happening is that your MTA is doing DNS resolution
    on recipients for messages delivered locally (i.e. from Mailman to
    your MTA via SMTPDirect.py). This is a Bad Thing. You need to turn
    off synchronous DNS resolution for messages originating from the
    local host.

    In Exim, the value to edit is receiver_verify_hosts. See
    README.EXIM for details. Other MTAs have (of course) different
    parameters and defaults that control this. First check the README
    file for your MTA and then consult your MTA's own documentation. 

I checked in /etc/exim/exim.conf on savannah.nongnu.org.  There is NO
setting for the receiver_verify_hosts variable.  I am guessing that it
is defaulting to an undesired setting.

Of course, I understand that the GNU mail servers are still especially
hard hit by the worm; my own tiny mail server at home still has a score
of messages stuck in the queue waiting to be rejected.

I hope this can get fixed soon.

Jonathan

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