On Sat, 18 Nov 1995 23:33:53 EST Roger Fajman <[log in to unmask]> said:
 
>What would be the undesirable side effects?
 
Why don't you take a look at your  console logs and see where the bulk of
the jobs are coming from :-)
 
>A limit  would also catch some  of these turkeys who  are subscribing to
>every list they can find.
 
This is a separate problem that  calls for a different solution. For what
it's worth, most of these people send a small number of jobs with a large
number of requests each.
 
>People here are  depending on LISTSERV now to conduct  business and this
>problem made  LISTSERV nearly  useless for two  days. The  problem might
>have been  detected sooner  if we had  had more people  at work  (NIH is
>mostly shut  down due to  the U.S.  Government funding fiasco),  but the
>people who were at work were still depending on LISTSERV for it's normal
>functions and  to distribute information  about the furlough.  It failed
>miserably. Anyway, it still took over a day to recover after the problem
>was discovered, although to be fair, some  of that is due to the machine
>being overloaded.
 
I was about  to say all that...  I run LISTSERV.NET and  about once every
other month I need to do something to prevent some idiot from jamming the
system. I  would rather  it ran on  autopilot 100% of  the time,  but the
creativity of  said idiots is  limitless. Now,  if LISTSERV.NET ran  on a
faster machine (say, a PC), I wouldn't  have to worry about that. I could
let the  problems happen and they'd  stop on their own  after the idiots'
mailboxes filled up.  With a PC I'd have enough  horsepower that it would
take dozens of  loops to impact local service. I  can't move LISTSERV.NET
to a  PC at the  moment because the software  to run a  full LISTSERV.NET
service is only  available on VM currently (there are  more urgent things
to port), but I'll do it as soon as it becomes possible.
 
Let's face it, if there were a  maximum number of incoming files per user
and per day, it  would have to be in the hundreds, and  of course the net
effect would be the same as a SERVE OFF. You said it took one day for the
situation to clear up after you served off the user. So, I don't see that
this would have  suppressed the problem, it would just  have made it less
dramatic.
 
  Eric