On Tue, 29 Mar 1994 11:32:22 -0500 David Barr <[log in to unmask]> said:
 
>Mail delivery is not a very CPU-intensive task. Its speed depends on how
>many hoops and  calls the system has  to go through to  get the message,
>figure out where it goes, then open up SMTP connection, etc.
 
I agree, as long as you include paging/forking in the list of "hoops". In
my experience, fork() abuse is what brings down most unix mail gateways.
 
>LISTSERV's problem  is that the  messsage flies  around a lot  of places
>before it can even get anwhere. Between SMTP, MAILER, LISTSERV, that's a
>lot of shuffles.
 
I'm sorry, but I don't understand what you're trying to get at. The total
delay is on the order of 1-2  seconds on a small VM system, sub-second on
a  "real" mainframe  (as compared  to having  the data  directly sent  to
SMTP). Most of the system resources are eaten up by SMTP, not LISTSERV or
MAILER. The  resource costs of the  "transfer" are charged mostly  to the
sending process, ie  LISTSERV or MAILER. At any rate,  SMTP would have to
input the message anyway, regardless of where it came from.
 
>As far as Majordomo's speed, Perl is quite fast - it's often compared to
>C in terms of speed. I'll put it up against VM's Pascal any day.
 
Here again, I have no idea what  you're getting at. LMail is written in a
combination of PASCAL  and REXX, with assembler  subroutines to implement
the  various system  interfaces  you  can't do  from  PASCAL. XMAILER  is
written in  assembler and C (mostly  assembler). LMail is 3  times faster
than XMAILER.  Obviously, REXX and PASCAL  must be 3 times  faster than C
and assembler - right? :-)
 
Don't misunderstand  me, I have  nothing against Majordomo. I  just don't
know why you're complaining about things which aren't a problem.
 
  Eric