Re: Distribution delays on mailing lists for GNU LilyPond

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 29/10/2022 à 06:34, Ian Kelling a écrit :
> I have an update. A lists.gnu.org user from emacs helped me identify
> some occasional backlogs that were happening, causing 2 - 3 hour delays
> of some messages every once in a while. I've done a deep dive into the
> performance of the system, identified some bottlenecks, and figured out
> how to eliminate them, making those tasks get done much more
> efficiently. Unfortunately, there was some bumps in the road in that
> process over the last week, leading to some long delays, but as of
> yesterday things are stable. Previously, a post to lilypond-user would
> often take 10 minutes to go out to ~1000 subscribers. Now, if there
> aren't a lot of other messages being processed, that will go out to all
> subscribers in about 2 minutes. Obviously, that will take longer if lots
> of messages get posted at the same time, 10 messages will take 10
> minutes or so, and messages from other lists can affect this, but there
> are only a handful of lists on our server with lots of subscribers like
> lilypond-user. The time to deliver scales linearly with the # of
> subscribers.



That's good news! Thank you very much for your work on this.



> The reasons for delayed messages I mentioned in my quote above still
> exist, and I want to note again that lilypond can add moderators to
> approve messages from new posters faster than the listhelpers, and this
> should be even more helpful now that messages are processed faster.



Right now, nominating moderators is not possible because the list
admin is unresponsive. Cf. our private correspondence.



> The next major improvement I plan to work on is deploying public-inbox,
> https://public-inbox.org/README.html, a new list archive which will
> operate alongside the existing one. It has many nice features, one that
> is not obvious is that it's search function should work better. An
> example is here https://inbox.sourceware.org/binutils/ . Mailman 3 will
> come after that.


Looks like this supports Unicode. For a list like lilypond-user-fr,
where many possible search terms have accents, this would go a long
way.

Thanks,
Jean