Re: Tweaking router performance.

[Tom Samplonius <tom@sdf.com>]

On Sun, 17 Aug 1997 pakrat@raleigh.ibm.com wrote:

> Through various management "genius" there is currently a project
> underway that will, in the end, be delivering half a million pieces of
> email a day (About 10 pieces of email sent to 50,000 recipients.
> Flame me on the stupidity of that later.  I am currently hunting
> managers.).
> 
> At this point, I am noticing that the biggest bottleneck looks to be the
> router (And that if I limit myself to 1 or 2 routers, I will get better 
> performance).  What can I do to shorten the amount of time a message
> spends in the router?  Should I choose to bypass the router, what
> files must I create to keep the scheduler happy?

  I don't think the router will be much of problem for a mailing list.  If
you put a 1000 recipients on each message, the router only need to handle
50 messages.  If you put more recipients on each message, the router's
memory usage will be higher.

> Does adequate locking exist so that multiple machines could use the
> same postoffice area (via NFS) for routing?  For scheduling?
> For SMTP delivery?

  I don't think the scheduler will like this very much.

> While I consider this to be spamming to the extreme, supposedly all 50,000
> recipients volunteered for the mail (I suspect that it was a default
> option on the first HTML form they saw).
> 
> Any information would be appreciated.


Tom