email module windows and suse

[Tim Roberts]

Lev Elbert <elbertlev at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>I have to make a custom email module, based on the standard one. The
>custom module has to be able to work with extremely large mails (1GB
>+), having memory "footprint" much smaller.

Then you have a design problem right from the start.  It is extremely rare
to find a mail server today that will transmit email messages larger than a
few dozen megabytes.  Even on a 100 megabit network, it's takes a minute
and a half for a 1GB message to go from the server to the user's
workstation.

What are you really trying to do here?  In most cases, you would be better
off storing your attachments on a web server and transmitting links in the
email.

>The modified program has to work in SUSE environment, while the
>development is done under Windows.  I'm not too good with linux and do
>not know if speedup in Windows translates one-to-one into speedup in
>SUSE. For example, if the bottleneck is IO, in windows I can spawn a
>separate thread or 2 to do "read-ahead".

We would need more information on your processing to advise you on this.
Disk I/O is slow, network I/O is slower.  You can't go any faster than your
slowest link.

>Are threads available and as effective in SUSE as they are in Windows?

Threads are available in Linux.  There is considerable debate over the
relative performace improvement.
-- 
Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.