[geeks] thoughts on SMTP

[David Passmore]

On Sun, Mar 24, 2002 at 12:10:40AM -0500, Greg A. Woods 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 got more
> than enough CPU to compress and decompress every SMTP stream you accept
> or create.

Perhaps they're 0.01% of mail servers, but as someone else said, they handle
99.99% of the e-mail.

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

Any properly designed and balanced system is close to hitting the limit of
every resource it has at peak usage-- CPU, I/O, bandwidth, memory, disk,
etc. Anyone with any brains who is designing an ISP mail system for millions
of transactions will solve the I/O issue and hit CPU and memory bottlenecks.

David