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