[R] Re: ... Outbound e-mail slow from R servers ...

[Martin Maechler]

About a day ago, I wrote
to R-devel (and Marc) :

>>>>> "MM" == Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>
>>>>>     on Thu, 3 Apr 2003 18:36:12 +0200 writes:

  >>>>> "Marc" == Marc Schwartz <mschwartz at medanalytics.com>
  >>>>>     on Thu, 03 Apr 2003 09:24:20 -0600 writes:

      Marc> Martin,

      Marc> Not sure if you are aware of this, but since yesterday
      Marc> there seems to be multi-hour delays in outbound e-mail
      Marc> from r-help and r-devel.  Inbound mail seems to show
      Marc> up on the archive OK.

      Marc> I am just now getting posts from late yesterday my
      Marc> time.  My post to r-devel on RH9 yesterday morning did
      Marc> not show up back to me until last night (my time).

      Marc> HTH,

    MM> Indeed that helped a bit, particularly since I'm in a
    MM> two day course today and tomorrow and haven't had time
    MM> to look closely.

    MM> What happened is that the mailman software has
    MM> occasionally been producing too long delays (of e.g.,
    MM> half an hour, even for R-core with 17 addresses!), for
    MM> quite a few weeks now -- which it didn't several weeks
    MM> ago.  The first thing I was advised to try was to revert
    MM> the mailman and sendmail settings to their defaults --
    MM> which I had done yesterday.  Additionally, yesterday a
    MM> big part of ETH had severe network problems during noon
    MM> time -- hence it wasn't too easy to find out which
    MM> timeouts where caused by what.

    MM> I have now re-reverted the mailman settings to what they
    MM> were before yesterday, and will start tackling the
    MM> "only" halfhour delays (which I think come from the
    MM> different qrunner setup that mailman 2.1.x is using --
    MM> which is active since about March 4).

    MM> Thanks for adverting me!

and the really bad thing that happened was that I had somehow
managed to almost stop mailman delivery ... 
I have restarted and things seem to got working much better
about an hour ago, and I've received many list mails myself
since  -- most delayed for more than a day...
I'm very sorry about that and hope it hasn't caused too much grief.

Martin Maechler <maechler at stat.math.ethz.ch>	http://stat.ethz.ch/~maechler/
Seminar fuer Statistik, ETH-Zentrum  LEO C16	Leonhardstr. 27
ETH (Federal Inst. Technology)	8092 Zurich	SWITZERLAND
phone: x-41-1-632-3408		fax: ...-1228			<><


PS: This still applies:

    MM> BTW: If anyone has time for writing a small perl or
    MM> python script that automatically retrieves the mailman
    MM> delay from the two "Received:" headers in each message
    MM> that contain "hypatia" -- I'd be quite grateful..