[Mailman-Developers] Re: To VERP or not to VERP?

[Chuq Von Rospach]

On Sunday, June 17, 2001, at 09:39 AM, J C Lawrence wrote:

> Exim for instance will defer
> deliveries if more than N messages are received in a single
> connection.  As a result, you typically get no outbound deliveries
> going on during a qrunner broadcast.

IMHO, I consider that seriously broken.

> I've done similar experiments with news spools.  The values are
> incredibly subjective to RAID stripe size.  Bob Mende IIRC did some
> interesting work here which I think he presented at LISA.
>
>   FWIW We ended up with a 1Meg strip size as the sweet spot, much
>   bigger than we'd expected.

I know someone who did the same, and found the best perforamnce iwth (I 
kid you not) 32 meg strip sizes.

> Silicon disks are another one.  At Critical Path we used solid state
> disks for /var/spool and Qmail fairly, umm, whirred.

But what I've found, for really large e-mail installations, there's 
always another bottleneck. The bigger/faster machine paradigm just 
doesn't scale after a while, so what I'm working on now is a new setup 
that I'm calling the "army of smurfs" design. I'm going to be buying 
lots of small/fast/cheap boxes, and not going to try to try to keep 
making that single monolithic machine do incrementally more.


--
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome <http://www.chuqui.com>
[<chuqui@plaidworks.com> = <me@chuqui.com> = <chuq@apple.com>]
Yes, yes, I've finally finished my home page. Lucky you.

Funny, I don't remember being absent minded.