Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!decwrl!bacchus.pa.dec.com!vixie From: vixie@decwrl.dec.com (Paul A Vixie) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: How efficient/fast is uucp? Message-ID: Date: 27 Aug 90 03:37:35 GMT References: <1990Aug27.021817.26499@daver.bungi.com> <1990Aug27.052302.28750@daver.bungi.com> Sender: news@wrl.dec.com (News) Organization: DEC Western Research Lab Lines: 38 In-Reply-To: dlr@daver.bungi.com's message of 27 Aug 90 05:23:02 GMT vix> Anyone know when smail3 is coming out of beta-test, OFFICIALLY ? dlr> Who can tell? Source is on uunet now, and I've been running it here dlr> for months (years?). Ferget the beta test, and go with it. It works well. Usually when I run a beta test of something, along comes the official version some months or years later with a few fundamental architectural changes in it such that my config files, local source patches, and brain- wave patterns are all subtly "wrong". Just ask anybody who ran my cron when it was in beta :-)... dlr> Give it a try; what have you got to lose but a dlr> few hours of your time? It's taken years to get the subtlties "right" in our sendmail setup. We have a a ring of eight mail queues such that messages get moved "outward" as they get old ("old" starts at an hour) with fewer delivery attempts as age increases; we run 27 dequeuing agents (sendmail -q) in parallel; we have a 700-line sendmail.cf with hooks and tweaks from every corner of the universe that has the look and smell of 80-year old bleu cheese. The bright side is that we're only forwarding 14,000 messages a day. It doubled every year for the last four years, and we weren't sure what kind of architecture we'd use to handle 28,000 messages a day. I think we're max'ed out on internal network bandwidth; there are 50,000 DECnet machines using us for internet forwarding, but we've only got five 56KB lines into that side of our universe so they can only throw so many bits per day. There's no way in the world that we could run a different mailer in only a few hours. Given the number of address tweaks we do and the number of messages we forward, new mailers need to be run in sidelined test machines for N days or weeks before we can put them into production. I tend to hack sendmail.cf "live", but it's a bit like running adb on a running kernel -- nobody else around here will try it :-). -- Paul Vixie DEC Western Research Lab Palo Alto, California ...!decwrl!vixie