[geeks] thoughts on SMTP

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Sunday, March 24, 2002 at 11:34:57 (-0500), Brian Hechinger wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: [geeks] thoughts on SMTP
>
> i think we are all leaving out a small detail here.  anyone running a reasonable
> sized mail server has a reasonable sized internet connection.  UE4500 at work
> sitting behind multiple T3 lines for example.  but what about that guy with the
> 56k dialup line?  compression would do him no end of good, and would cause
> almost no impact on any other mail server.  56k is just too slow to cause any
> sort of serious load on anyone trying to compress/decompress that stream.  i
> think bill pointed it out, this is a choice between cpu and bandwidth.

Huh?  I used to get nearly as much e-mail back when I had a 28.8kbps PPP
link (with very high latency) as I do today.  My PPP link was idle much
of the time (except when I was doing a lot of FTP, www browsing or
such).  You should work out the number of bytes of plain raw
un-compressed SMTP you push through a low-latency 56kbps link before you
go thinking you need to compress any of it!

Sure if you have to run a huge mailing list on the end of a
low-bandwidth pipe then you might want compression, but if you're doing
that then something else is wrong with your scenario!  ;-)

-- 
								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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