I'm completely at my wits' end on this one, so I figured I'd appeal to the
collective brain on this one.

I'm using 1.8d on Solaris 2.6, using LSMTP on an outbound NT box, and an
Oracle 8.0.4 database for a DBMS backend.

I've got four lists that we recently switched from standard (flat file)
lists to DBMS lists.  Two are minor, one has about 15,000 subs, and one has
about 65,000.  They are all announce-only.  The database on the backend is
on the same subnet, and is configured in ARCHIVELOG mode (which means any
data manipulation gets logged to a memory buffer and ultimately to disk for
crash protection).

Here's the problem: if I turn on LISTSERV, it starts updating the table with
huge selects (discovered while tracing the connection):

SELECT EMAIL,NAME,OPTIONS
FROM SSERVER.LISTSERV_CTWFAMILYNEWSLETTER
WHERE OPTIONS IS NOT NULL
FOR UPDATE OF  EMAIL,NAME,OPTIONS,UEMAIL

This starts generating a *large* amount of archived redo logs, and quickly.
Oracle is configured to dump out those logs to disk when they reach 20M in
size.  When listserv is enabled, this happens approximately every minute.
Without listserv on, it cycles every hour or so.  The extra 1.2G of data per
hour crashes our database right quick.  This causes all sorts of problems.
So we can't keep listserv up.  Haven't for weeks now.  That's no good
either.

Subscribes/unsubs are also slow (60-90 sec per), but I assume that's a
secondary symptom.

So, has anybody actually gotten DBMS lists to work nicely with ORACLE in
ARCHIVELOG mode?  Am I missing something fundamental?  Any advice is
desparately sought.  Even if you know of consultants I can call on, that'd
help too -- my boss recently told me "look, if you need money for
consultants, okay.  If you need to replace listserv with something else,
okay.  Just get it back up, with database support!"

Thanks in advance, all.

--
Scott Swanson
Sysadmin, CTW Online
http://www.ctw.org/