Who reads what and why:
1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.
3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are good at crossword puzzles.
4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand The New York Times. They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.
5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could find the time, and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California to do it.
6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.
7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
8. The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who’s running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.
10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure there is a country or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy provided, of course, that they are not Republicans.
11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.
12. None of these are read by the guy who is running the country.
H/T:
So I run the Atlanta Linux Enthuisasts’ list on mailman. Recently the server has been running loads between 5 and 8 – way more than it should be. Doing a top showed python using most of my CPU. I tracked it back to mailman and the config.pck file which as 50M.
The problem came about due to spam sent to the ale-* administrative addresses. Each time a spammer sent an email to that list, it would add an entry to the hold_and_cmd_autoresponses variable in the config.pck file. Every time python needs to access the ale config, it had to decrypt the config.pck file which uses lots of CPU.
The solution is to overwrite that vaiable with a null. Its possible doing this could break someone trying to subscribe to the list, but eh, its a free list, they can re-try.
Create a file with the following in it:
hold_and_cmd_autoresponses={}
then run the following command from your mailman root:
bin/config_list -i /tmp/foo ale
/tmp/foo is the file I created and ale is the list I needed to fix. It dropped my 50M config.pck to 1.8M and my load issues have gone down dramatically.