On May 3,  6:36pm, John Witherspoon wrote:
> >I have someone asking if they can run a 140,000 member listserv on our
machine
> >(a SPARC 20, 96 meg of ram).  Does anyone out there have experience with
> >driving a list that large, and what it takes to do it?
 
> With apologies for the mini-flame, I'd be willing to bet it would take
> more resources than AOL seems to have at the moment.
 
> We (at SHOtimes-l) got so disgusted with "mailbox full" and other errors from
> AOL servers that we set all our AOL subscribers to DIGEST permanently.  We
> resend the command often to make sure nobody's trying to escape; a number of
> AOLers have jumped to other services as a result.
 
> God help you (and the rest of us who will have to deal with the indirect
> delays) if somebody tries to support a list of 140,000 from AOL.
 
> -- John Witherspoon
>    Washington, DC
 
        Hi John.  I was hoping for something a little more helpful.  As it
happens, AOL currently runs at least two listservers (the general one,
listserv.aol.com, which supports a number of lists, including one with over
40,000 members) and my smaller operation which supports mailing lists needed by
commercial outfits purchasing web services from GNN (a service now known as
GNNhost, formerly Naviservice.)  I personally run 2 small, non-work related
lists on the listserv.aol.com machine.  Most of our subscribers are not on AOL,
but all over the world, and those of us running lists here or elsewhere have
all seen what happens when someone doesn't read their mail for a while on AOL
or Compuserve (yes, oddly, I've never noticed a Prodigy address filling up.
 Perhaps they just drop the mail on the floor, or it may be that a very small
number of their subscribers sign on to mailing lists.)  I've also seen the same
from Universities, businesses, and goverment sites.  Just not as many as from
AOL, but then the larger universities have 1000th our number of addresses.
 
        So the fact we all see more bounced mail from AOL is equivalent to
seening more returned mail from New York City than from Paducah.  True, but
trivial.  At over 5 million accounts, how much disk space do you think is
reasonable for each person to use?  And how would you enforce such a limit?
Not that my job has anything to do with AOL mail.  I just run a listserv
machine.
 
        Now then, would you have any idea what the specs might be for a machine
to support a Listserv with 140,000 members?