[Mailman-Users] big lists, big messages

[J C Lawrence]

On Sun, 13 May 2001 00:22:08 -0700 (PDT) 
tib  <tib at tigerknight.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 12 May 2001, J C Lawrence wrote:
>> Your math is off as it ignores RCPT-TO envelope size.

> So throw in a few more bytes times 10k and it gets even bigger

Chuq has already addressed this point thoroughly.

>> Actually, list servers are generically disk IO bound with the
>> primary factor in the disk IO being open/close/unlink time not
>> read/write time.

> I'm not quite the hardware guru I'd like to be yet - explain in
> english please?

MTAs are fundamentally disk IO bound.  This is one of the reason
that several large mail houses run their mail spools on silicon
disks (ie hard drives which sit on SCSI busses, and which are made
out of RAM).  Within the bottleneck that is formed by disk IO,
read/write time is a smaller percentage.  open/close/delete occupy
the lion's share of the IO time.  Ergo, volume of data processed is
really not that concerning -- its the NUMBER of data items (spool
entries) processed that is concerning.

>> This assumes of course that the audience has web access, and in
>> particular has web access at the time and on the device they
>> would normally read the messages.
>> 
>> Example : It wouldn't work for me reading on the train on my
>> laptop.

> Who has email that does not have web access at the time they get
> their email?  

I do.

> Granted I suppose it's possible that you would download your mail
> ahead of time before leaving home and then opening your laptop on
> the train.

The laptop has a Wavelan card.  When its at home it auto-joins the
home network and picks up the mail my server has spooled for it, and
delivers the mail it has waiting for outbound.  I then go to work,
laptop in tow, and (generally) have no more 'net access from the
laptop until I retunr home.  (I'm still not happy with this setup,
but it kinda works ATM).

Given the number of others I see on the train reading mail I'm
nowhere near alone in this (tho our methods will vary on how we got
there -- mine is excessively complex).

-- 
J C Lawrence                                       claw at kanga.nu
---------(*)                          http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
The pressure to survive and rhetoric may make strange bedfellows