[geeks] thoughts on SMTP

[Mike Meredith]

On Sunday 24 March 2002 05:10, woods at weird.com wrote:
> 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

I didn't realise NT had that bad a market penetration in this area :)

> 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....   :-)

Well it's something to do with all that spare CPU capacity!

You might be suprised just how much you can do with a stupid 
interpreted language though ... I'm running a moderately busy web cache 
(2.5million hits a day on 1 machine) with a performance problem.

As part of the effort to demonstrate that the problem was down to disk 
i/o, I turned off various things in turn to get an idea of how much 
impact they had on the performance ... turning off the Perl-based ad 
zapping had pretty much no effect.

It's forking things off that kills performance --- not running an 
interpreted language.