"CVR" == Chuq Von Rospach <chuqui@plaidworks.com> writes:
CVR> The obverse of that is that end-users seriously dislike
CVR> delays, especially on conversational lists. It turns into the
CVR> old "user expectation" problem -- it's better to hold ALL
CVR> mail for 15 minutes so users come to expect it than to
CVR> normally deliver mail in 2 minutes, except during the worst
CVR> bulges...That's been my experience as well. People expect email to do strange things to conversations, like show you replies before you've seen the original message, or have turnaround times on the order of quarter-hours or whatever. It's when the behavior they expect changes that people start to notice.
Case in point: I recently moved most of the python.org mailing lists to a new, faster machine with better network connectivity. Turnaround time tanked and I started getting complaints that messages weren't being seen in inboxes after 6 hours or so. To make matters worse, those messages were /in/ the archive! <scratch> <scratch>. Ah ha! /etc/syslog.conf was configured to log mail.* and syslogd was starving the MTA.
CVR> But in general, the MLM should deliver as fast as
CVR> it reasonable can without overloading the MUA, which implies
CVR> some kind of monitoring setup for the MUA, or some
CVR> user-controlled throttling system. the latter unfortunately,
CVR> implies teaching admins how to monitor and adjust, a support
CVR> issue. The former implies writing an interface for every MTA
CVR> -- a development AND support issue.Let me change that a little bit. The MLM should /process/ messages as fast as possible, getting them through the moderate-and-munge and into the outbound queue at top speed possible. Once that message is sitting in that outbound queue, it's that queue's runner process that can be configured to throttle, distribute, batch, whatever it takes. It's not the MLM's problem (not to say it isn't the problem of the simple-minded qrunner script we distribute and enable by default). All I need to do is document the file format for the outbound queue files and site administrators can take it from there.
-Barry