On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, John R. Andrews wrote:

> We have several lists from 5k-20k subscribers which we load weekly.
> Currently, a production job sends each list and header using a PUTALL
> command. The whole job of loading all the lists takes 6 hours on an
> RX6000 single procesor 590 running AIX. One of the lists takes an hour
> to load. While this is happening, I've been told, listserv doesn't
> do anything else. So effectively all list mail is backed up for 6 hours.

Maybe you can do an "ADD" instead. We loaded approximately 32,000
subscriptions into a list recently. Listserv hardly burped at the request.
We used a bulk add batch job to accomplish this task. It worked quite
nicely. Of course, the system we use for our Listserv is rather heavily
armed with processing power so I am sure that helped. Its an AlphaServer
4100 with two CPUs, 2GB of RAM, and plenty of disk space for Listserv to
use spread over two logical volumes (one for the web stuff and one for all
the ~listserv/home files). The Listserv log file for that time period
showed a fair amount of activity unrelated to this request and Listserv
seemed to work just fine without undue delays.

Most of these subscriptions were for addresses on a single system, which
happens to be another AlphaServer 4100. A very brief message that was sent
to this particular list after the subscriptions were added took about
thirteen seconds to be distributed by Listserv and qmail (we don't run
sendmail on our Listserv). On the other hand, the recipient system spent
something like four hours processing the resulting sendmail/procmail
requests as it attempted to deliver the message to the individual
addresses.

Note that I am going by memory here so I might be in error about the
specific times, but suffice it to say, it was pretty fast.