On 9/15/2005 7:57 AM, Jean Bédard wrote:
> 
>> One way to address this issue would be to create a sub-list 
>> for this list, and subscribe the TA to the sub-list.
> 
> We did that at the time, creating an "Owners list" for each class, to be 
 > used at the Owner= and Sub-Lists= keywords, and even a "control list"
 > for the Send= keyword, but that meant three lists for each class; today,
 > this would mean 11748 lists instead of 3916 for the current session, and
 > we have been asked to always keep three sessions. It was such a huge
 > number of lists that it was hard for LISTSERV, even HPO, and our daily
 > scripts took the night to execute. So now we use Owners lists and control
 > lists only for programs, departments, faculties and for the global students
 > lists, not anymore for classes. Of course, it depends on how many classes
 > you have.
> 

We are running into the same sort of problems here. We are running LISTSERV
HPO on Solaris, using a Sun Fire V480 with 32 GB of memory and 2-900 Mhz
processors. We currently have over 30,000 lists. Approximately 28,000 of
them were created in the past 18 months.

We began automatically creating a list for every course/section approximately
a year ago. For Fall 2005, we created nearly 7900 lists. This past summer, we
began automatically creating lists to support an application which enables an
authorized college or departmental faculty or staff member to send an email
message to all students who match a pre-defined demographic, e.g., all junior
art history majors. For Fall 2005, we created approximately 4400 student lists
and an equal number of control lists which identify the faculty and staff
members who are allowed to post to the corresponding student lists. Due to
requirements of the application, we will create a similar number of lists for
the same purpose each semester. All of the information required to create and
populate these lists stored in one of our administrative databases, however,
LISTSERV's limited database support does not allow us to simply write an SQL
query to extract the required information from an existing database. We intend
to evaluate other options for supporting course-related and administrative
lists.

--
Paul Russell
Senior Systems Administrator
OIT Messaging Services Team
University of Notre Dame