Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!EU.net!Ireland.EU.net!Ireland.EU.net!not-for-mail From: nick@eunet.ie (Nick Hilliard) Newsgroups: comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.smail,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Sendmail vs. Smail... Followup-To: poster Date: 11 Dec 1996 13:21:48 -0000 Organization: EUnet Ireland Network Operations Lines: 39 Message-ID: <58mchc$d6o@ezekiel.eunet.ie> References: <57tf61$gq7@raven.eva.net> <589s2i$aro@raven.eva.net> <58ffd7$op8@pacer.nlc.net.au> <58h6r1$8ik@ezekiel.eunet.ie> <1996Dec1005.15.53.2968@koobera.math.uic.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: news.ieunet.ie X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.mail.sendmail:35055 comp.mail.smail:2691 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:32427 D. J. Bernstein (djb@koobera.math.uic.edu) said: : Profile. Don't speculate. Your experience with serial mailers does not : apply to programs handling several jobs at once. The MMDF system I'm running currently has around 30 delivery daemons active on a number of different queues. I'm not talking about a simple serial system. : In a test at the high end---sending a message to 10 recipients at AOL--- : parallel connections were nearly twice as fast as a serial connection. ... at the expense of running 10 extra delivery daemons on your local system and using 10x traffic. Feel free to disagree with me, but this is a mighty inefficient use of resources. : In a test at the low end---sending a message to 10 recipients at a : poorly connected host in Taiwan---parallel connections all succeeded : within two days. With serial connections, the mail NEVER GOT THROUGH. CAPITAL LETTERS or not, if an ISP or end-user system cannot handle 10 RCPT's on one SMTP connection, that's their problem and it's their job to fix it. I have no wish to waste my time coping with other peoples' incapacity to manage their systems or provision sufficient resources. Why don't they have secondary MX to a nearer site? Why haven't they provisioned more or better bandwidth? Additionally in this case, if the problem with this site is line overload, sending 10 copies of the email is just making this user's line overload problem even worse than it already is. It is a kludge which will put a metaphorical plaster on this site's gangrene. In this situation, 10 copies of the one mail is not a proper fix. Generally speaking, for any system, no matter how well designed, you can create pathological situations which will cause it to puke (the crab/record player sketch in Hofstadter's GEB comes to mind here :-). This is verging on flamage -- Followup-To: poster has been set. Nick