Bug: Downloading mail archives from Mailman3 often times out

[malemburg]

Describe the bug

I've been trying to download the mail archive for the python-list (comp.lang.python mirror) via https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-list@python.org/ for history research purposes.

• The complete download directly fails with a message that the request will time out.
• The monthly download times out for a lot of months.
• Using the URL parameters, I then tried half month downloads and even weekly downloads, but still get time outs.

In essence there appears to be no usable way to download the complete archive using this Mailman3 interface.

Using the old Mailman2 interface from https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/, the downloads succeed without any problems - essentially those are static files, not files which the server needs to generate upon request.

Is there anything which could be done about this (e.g. extending timeouts or increasing VM sizing parameters) ?

Thanks.

To Reproduce

1. Go to https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-list@python.org/
2. Try to download e.g. July 2001

Expected behavior

A working download without timeouts.

URL to the issue

https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-list@python.org/

Screenshots

"![SCREENSHOT_DESCRIPTION](SCREENSHOT_LINK.png)"

Browsers

Chrome

Operating System

Windows

Browser Version

No response

Relevant log output

Additional context

No response

[malemburg]

Some additional information:

The largest archives size I could successfully download was only about 2.6MB in size.

The Mailman2 archives, which are in a trimmed down mbox file format (losing lots of headers and the attachments), have gzipped sizes up to around 5MB for e.g. Jan 2009.

I would expect file sizes up to at least 10MB gzipped to work without problems.

[malemburg]

I ended up using 5 day intervals for the download. That's not really how it should be. The web interface fails for many months.

There's one day which cannot be downloaded, even when trimming down the range to a single day: 2000-10-11.

Here's the URL: https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-list@python.org/export/python-list.mbox.gz?start=2000-10-11&end=2000-10-12

This appears to be a separate issue, since the download fails before reaching the usual limit of around 2MB.