[geeks] thoughts on SMTP

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Saturday, March 23, 2002 at 20:45:16 (-0800), David Passmore wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] thoughts on SMTP
>
> On Sat, Mar 23, 2002 at 11:39:23PM -0500, James Sharp wrote:
> 
> > No.  Negotiate compression between MTAs and mail servers.
> 
> Okay, then I still don't see how that applied to what I said-- that mail
> servers today (I mean 'servers' as in 'machines')-- are not scaled properly
> to accept any kind of computationally expensive processing on mail messages,
> whether this includes compression/decompression or encryption of some type.

Unless you're running one of the 0.01% of mail servers that actually use
as much CPU as they can I'll bet dollars to donuts that you've got more
than enough CPU to compress and decompress every SMTP stream you accept
or create.

Modern mail Unix servers are always I/O bound -- never CPU bound.

Unless of course you're trying to use some stupid interpreted language
to parse through the body of the message with ugly regular expressions
and such....   :-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;  <gwoods at acm.org>;  <g.a.woods at ieee.org>;  <woods at robohack.ca>
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