3.0ES -> 4.0ES Upgrade Difference?

[Ed Wilts]

On Wed, Apr 06, 2005 at 01:25:07PM -0500, Michael Wilson wrote:
> Hi, list folks. Be gentle. This is my first time!

Not bad - you're stumping most people on your first attempt :-)
 
> We operate an email list server that dispatches e-mail newsletters for
> various clients. We are using a perl script called "Subscribe Me" to blast
> these mailings out. 
>  
> The Subscribe Me perl script simply reads the email addresses from a list,
> and one at a time invokes sendmail to dispatch them. 
>  
> We were running RHEL 3.0 ES on an Athlon 1Ghz machine. Shortly after 4.0 was
> released, I downloaded it and did an upgrade, which went without incident.

BTW, it's not 3.0 and 4.0.  There is no .0 in either one.  It's RHEL 3
and RHEL 4.

Did you do a fresh install or an upgrade? 

> After the upgrade, we noticed that the mail blast machine had gone
> from dispatching 4 to 5 emails per second, to one email every 4 to 5
> seconds. A DRASTIC slowdown.

> There are no errors anywhere in the logs. DNS and Sendmail all seem to be
> working as usual, but for some reason that mailing script has slowed to a
> crawl. 

Can you run just one message at a time through manually and see if it is
still slow?  Can you trace your script to see if you can find any
specific code fragments that slowed down?  Can you invoke sendmail
manually with the address to see if it's sendmail or some other part of
your script?

Have you checked /etc/sysconfig/i18n and compared the differences
between your RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 installations?  One of the things that
made perl slow was was the unicode stuff.  Although important for some
users, the vast majority don't need or want it - it just slowed things
down.

Do you have an extra system lying around that you can do a fresh install
of 4 on to see if it still exhibits the same issue as an upgrade?

-- 
Ed Wilts, RHCE
Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program