[Mailman-Users] big lists, big messages

[J C Lawrence]

On Sun, 13 May 2001 00:41:16 -0700 
Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui at plaidworks.com> wrote:

> On 5/13/01 12:22 AM, "Tib" <tib at tigerknight.org> wrote:
>> Who has email that does not have web access at the time they get
>> their email?

> Not a huge number, but not zero. As wireless mobile becomes more
> significant, it'll be a growing issue, not a shrinking one.

Which of course means that your web page must now be WAP friendly
and desktop browser friendly.  Reading the web effectively on a
connected Palm requires a rather different view on web design.

>> The load of an entire batch (rough 300meg estimate) will also be
>> spread out more over the course of a few days as everyone checks
>> their mail and may or may not look at that message and cause it
>> to draw on the url or click/paste it into a browser themselves.

> No, it won't. There's a huge peak in the few hours after delivery,
> which drops radically after that and stretches out over about ten
> days or so.

I wandered over to Akami a few months ago and looked at the graphs
of attack time and decay rates for sites that hit Slashdot.  The
leading edge of the peak is typically measured in single digit
minutes.  The decay rates vary fairly widely depending on the time
of posting, but fall into a small number of basic camps.

>> It all boils down to a matter of how you want to use your server.

> And whether you want to pay for peak load capacities on your web
> server or the lower, spread out push capacities on your e-mail.

There's also the possiblity of using your ISP's MTAs as smarthosts
(which many ISPs actively encourage and some enforce/require).

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