> The biggest challenge will be finding a test system with enough power to > handle the production load. I do most of my LISTSERV for unix testing on a 433MHz system, precisely because I want to see performance problems before customers run into them. We cannot test or even anticipate every possible real-life configuration issue, but this helps. We do of course have much faster development systems, but they are used mainly to test scenarios where a lot of horsepower can be assumed, and for benchmarking. For the purpose of testing your LISTSERV startup time with 1.8e vs. 14.4, you can use just about any system. Copy the data, time with 1.8e, time with 14.4. My guess is that your startup times will go down to well under 10 minutes with 14.4, if the only thing you change is the software version. Having done that, you can then look into tuning and, perhaps, minor hardware upgrades or reconfigurations. If you only see a minor improvement with 14.4, it means there is some kind of contention at the file-system level. Eric