At 6:33 PM -0700 9/27/06, Carson Gaspar wrote:
I love the idea. A fork/exec per message always makes me twitch... I have a feeling it would also provide better fault-tolerance, especially in a replicated filesystem cluster, where you have clear atomic behaviour at your disposal.
I agree that fork()/exec() is not an ideal model here, but then postfix doesn't use that model internally -- it uses a single parent with multiple child processes, and then hands off sockets. It also keeps pretty much the entire working queue in memory, as opposed to single-threading through the filesystem.
I don't see how using Maildir is going to solve any of these problems. IMO, if we're going to learn from postfix, I think we should learn the right things and take away the right lessons, and not just glom onto some alternative technique that has been known to have a whole host of other problems.
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