Hi, In one of my past lives I ran a load of email lists via different list processors. It is suprising how hard this is to get running well. You'd think it would be easy, but, you want to distribute an inbound message out to multiple outbound processes and then those multiple out bound processes try to send the mail out. On a high traffic mail list you eassily can get replies going out before the origional message goes out just by having one of the outbound process hang trying to contact someone's inbound email server. And you can easily get multiple copies if the last little bit of the SMTP protocol is dropped on the floor by TCP. Sigh..
Another choice is to force single threading, ie, one message is delivered to the whole list of users before the next message is delivered. On a list of any size this will result in very few messages per day since some node on the list is always disconnected and requires a timeout and wait for N minutes to retry.
Oh yea, the number of bounces, even from well connected nodes is stunning.
Kudos to teh uiuc folks :-)
cheers
bruce
"Jarvis, Robert P. (Contingent)" Jarvisb@timken.com wrote:
Ouch - that came out harsher than I meant.
To be fair to the people at UIUC, who have been incredibly generous in the support of the Squeak and Smalltalk communities, my observation is that *ALL* list servers have problems.
Bob Jarvis Compuware @ Timken
-----Original Message----- From: Jarvis, Robert P. (Contingent) Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2001 8:17 AM To: 'squeak@cs.uiuc.edu' Subject: RE: Wormhole Instability (was Why do things keep changing?) Importance: High
-----Original Message----- From: JArchibald@aol.com [mailto:JArchibald@aol.com] Aha! Now I understand Fleeberz's comment: "I've only had a few bounces in the last 17 years or so".
THEY ARE BOTH WRITING TO US FROM SEVENTEEN YEARS IN THE FUTURE. AND THE MAILING LIST IS STILL SCREWING UP !!!
Yes, well...isn't it nice to know that despite the ups and the downs, the vicissitudes of life, the general tendency towards chaos and anarchy, and the lack of a good five cent cigar, one can count on some things and say, "Well, no matter what else may happen you can always count on the Squeak list server to have problems". It's rather endearing, really... :-)
Bob Jarvis Compuware @ Timken
squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org