The mailing list server is a very busy box. The problem is mailman's terrible implementation of an archiver called pipermail. The problem is mostly in how pipermail builds the date and thread views of an archive. For all the ugly details, http://www.mn-linux.org/search/ and search for "mailman slow" A somewhat brief explaination: First mailman hands off the archiving responsibility to pipermail. Pipermail then appends every message to a mbox file in $MAILMANHOME/archives/private/tcwug-list.mbox, this alone is nasty. Since many of the mailing list have Gb sized mbox files. (crunchy disks) Next, a cron job runs, that takes the huge mbox file above and breaks it out into "time slices", which for tcwug is monthly and shoves the the current month's postings into $MAILMANHOME/archives/private/tcwug-list/YYYY-MMM.txt. Another cron job runs, which takes the $MAILMANHOME/archives/private/tcwug-list/YYYY-MMMM.txt and gzip -9's the file. (heavy cpu load). Yet another cron job runs with takes the $MAILMANHOME/archives/private/tcwug-list.mbox file and breaks it out into the individual messages in $MAILMANHOME/archives/private/tcwug-list/YYYY-MMMM/xxxxxx.html. (crunch disk and heavy cpu load). The design is poor, the mailman group knows it. They plan a re-write of pipermail some time in the future. Even the original author of pipermail calls it crap and abandoned it. It's only supported in mailman (http://www.amk.ca/python/unmaintained/pipermail.html). Like always in the open source world, if you are a python guru, look at the code and contribute. Help fix the problem. Fixing a problem is hard. Complaining about a problem is easy. :-) *** OR **** If you are like me and think the archiving of mail message should be left to an external package and you know Java, join the Mail Portable Online Storage System on sourceforge (https://sourceforge.net/projects/mposs/). It's goal is to have functionality like Geocrawler, but open source. Random stats: The box is under load, it runs around 3.5 to 4.0 almost 24hrs a day. The box also processes a lot of mail (IMHO) May 12 - May 31: 314,013 Jun 1 - Jun 5 : 27,267 vendor_id : GenuineIntel cpu family : 6 model : 1 model name : Pentium Pro stepping : 9 cpu MHz : 199.437 cache size : 256 KB total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 126704 123888 2816 12 10552 25348 -/+ buffers/cache: 87988 38716 Swap: 262136 23116 239020 (Yes, it could use more RAM) -- Bob Tanner <tanner at real-time.com> | Phone : (952)943-8700 http://www.mn-linux.org, Minnesota, Linux | Fax : (952)943-8500 http://www.tcwug.org, Minnesota, Wireless | Coding isn't a crime. Key fingerprint = 6C E9 51 4F D5 3E 4C 66 62 A9 10 E5 35 85 39 D9