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Sun, 13 Feb 1994 06:03:45 +0100 |
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Message of Sat,
12 Feb 1994 23:30:41 EST from LISTSERV give-and-take forum
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On Sat, 12 Feb 1994 23:30:41 EST Stan Horwitz <[log in to unmask]> said:
>I wonder if there will be any advantage to running Listserv on a Unix
>box rather than VM for those of us who have both platforms at hand.
Initially it will be to your advantage to keep the VM version because the
first non-VM releases will be incomplete. After that it will become a
local policy decision. Personally I would keep LISTSERV on the mainframe
because it is locked up in a vault, more reliable, backups are made
regularly, etc. LISTSERV itself requires very little resources and these
resources (mostly I/O) are best provided by a mainframe. I would move the
SMTP engine to an AXP system running VMS though, because this function is
quite expensive on the mainframe and there is no advantage to having it
there (given the costs). You can do that today, although you'd have to
use NJE to get the files to the AXP. I'm going to be doing this myself as
soon as DEC delivers that box we ordered in December (the last they said
was "after Feb 28th", which confirmed my impression that they were still
busy trying to remember which shoe was left and which month came after
Feb 28th). Our SMTP traffic has been increasing by 25% since August
(except in December) and by a factor of 10 over the last 2 years. If we
don't get it off the 9221 quickly there will soon be delays of over 1h
during prime time.
>I suspect the Unix version will be faster,
The performance of functions where REXX doesn't get involved is mostly
limited by your I/O system. It may not seem obvious when you are running
1.7f as most commands are in REXX, with DISTRIBUTE and a lot of internal
and low-level functions in PASCAL. With 1.8a most list management
commands are in PASCAL and run as fast as your I/O system. On my sub-PC a
QUERY listname FOR *XYZ*@XYZ on a list with 5000 subscribers takes about
1 second of CPU time and 3 seconds to complete. On a typical mainframe it
would take 0.1 second of CPU time and would probably complete in less
than one second. Note that QUERY ... FOR NOTONTHELIST@XYZ takes 0.05
second on SEARN. The wildcard makes sure the whole file has to be read.
>Features notably missing from the Unix Pascal compiler here are
>formatted output and string manipulation which are available on VM's
>rendition of Pascal even though they may not compile efficiently.
These features are totally unusable in all the PASCAL compilers I have
seen, so I just wrote my own set of functions, which has already been
ported to unix and VMS.
>Being as though Temple is a backbone Listserver, what will the impact of
>the rest of the Listservers be if we were to migrate our VM Listserv to
>the new Unix one assuming it will run on one of our Unix systems?
The non-VM version will be based on LISTSERV-TCP/IP, which does not
require NJE. In principle your very own version 1.7f contains all the
code necessary to communicate with LISTSERV-TCP/IP, but there is no
guarantee that it will work. I would not be surprised if changes were
required and one ended up with a situation where LISTSERV-TCP/IP can only
communicate with, say, version 1.8c or above. In addition to this
problem, which is tied to a change in LISTSERV protocol, there may be a
number of additional problems with the non-VM versions which of course I
can't say anything about now.
Eric
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