root@li2-168:/var/lib/mailman/data# ../bin/discard ./heldmsg-asciidoc-discuss-11
.pck

Discarded held msg #11 for list asciidoc-discuss
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "../bin/discard", line 120, in ?
    main()
  File "../bin/discard", line 113, in main
    mlist.Save()
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 564, in Save
    self.SaveRequestsDb()
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 129, in SaveRequestsDb
    self.__closedb()
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 108, in __closedb
    cPickle.dump(self.__db, fp, 1)
MemoryError
root@li2-168:/var/lib/mailman/data# 

[/code]

How much memory do you available when you run the command?

Also how large is /heldmsg-asciidoc-discuss-11.pck?

Sean

root@li2-168:/var/lib/mailman/data# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           347        344          3          0          1          8
-/+ buffers/cache:        334         13
Swap:          255        255          0

well I managed to get rid of that one... I will see how large another one is in a sec.

It may just be because I havent had my coffee but it appears you have 3 megs of ram and 0 swap free? That would be a major issue. Please correct me if I am reading that output wrong.

Sean

well its happening because of mailman... increasing swap is not the solution. getting mailman to behave is

It hard to tell without knowing the whole picture but if you have large files and mailman is trying to load multiple large files into limited memory(over 1.2 gigs of files at once) then mailman isnt misbehaving it just the system isn't scaled correctly to the traffic.

Are you having a large amount of new traffic to your mailing lists since it started happening?

no not a low of new traffic. I just made the mistake of ignoring all those held messages... now there are tons of them. And the request.pck file is huge.

THe good news is that the guy I was doing this list for wants to move to a Google group. So I will be doing apt-get remove mailman soon and very soon (grin) hahahahahahha!

That will certainly fix the problem

Another possible solution is to create a good size swap file temporarily and mount it as swap while doing the discard. It will be slow but it should work if it is truly a memory issue.