At 10:02 AM +0000 2004/02/02, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
Of course if its only a list box, and you don't care too much about absolute auditability through the mail delivery system you could just switch of sync operations on that filesystem and probably get one hell of a speed up.... at the risk of interesting things happening in the case of a crash.
In fact, in the case of announce-only lists of a very time-sensitive nature (e.g., sending out daily updates of the latest news over the past 24 hours that matches certain search criteria), you can do what InfoBeat/MercuryMail did -- run everything from a RAM disk. In that case, you don't care if there is a crash and millions of messages are lost, since you'll do another run tomorrow.
In fact, if you use one of the battery-backed RAM disks (solid-state disks, actually) which are supported by Linux and FreeBSD (among others), you can get up to 4GB (or more) of reliable storage that will be lightning fast, and you will have the best of all possible worlds.
This enhancement is mentioned as the final step to maximum performance gain in my slides at <http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/sendmail-tuning/>. If you're going to seriously consider this route, you probably want to look at the other options, too.
The RocketDrive (see <http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm>) is one example, then there's the SolidDate SSD (see <http://www.soliddata.com/products/1000/1000_specs.html>) and the RAM-SAN from Texas Memory Systems (see <http://www.superssd.com/default.asp>).
-- Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles@skynet.be>
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.
GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E-(---) W+++(--) N+ !w--- O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++) tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- r---(+++)* z(+++)