Zopistas - I'd appreciate any comments you might have on this. Also, I wonder if it might be relevant to the zope.org slow posting issue recently discussed on zope-web. Simon Michael <simon@joyful.com> writes:
I ran into the very slow comment issue last week and did some investigation. Using top on the server I saw some comments resulting in a runaway cpu-bound curl process. If I killed this process the pending comment in my web browser would immediately complete (successfully).
The curl process was invoked by the mailin alias, which happens to be on the same server. My guess is that the server processes a comment from the web; as final step calls mailhost.send to deliver it to subscribers; this blocks until delivery is complete; it attempts to deliver to the local mailin alias, because I use the wiki's mailin address as a harmless To header; the alias tries to post to zope; some kind of zope multithreading/locking contention ensues, and the curl process starts taking an ever-increasing percentage of cpu.
On this theory and for efficiency I changed mailouts to use "To: ;" instead (ie no To:). Zwiki.org has been using this for the last couple of days and I haven't noticed the slow comments but I don't know if it was a fix. Unfortunately I did notice that it messes up wide replies, because you always get a "Cc: ;" - harmless but messy. So for now I have changed back to using "To: wikiaddress". Further investigation needed - I'd appreciate any further ideas on the runaway process scenario.
Best regards, -Simon