On Thu, 14 Dec 2000 14:52:00 -0800 Chuq Von Rospach chuqui@plaidworks.com wrote:

one thing I'm doodling with for my SMTP back end is starting up a server that places a socket, then starting up "N" SMTP processes as clients that grab addresses from the server one at a time for delivery. This gets me completely away fro this "slow DNS" stuff, since any one slow address slows only itself, and since the system I'm looking at is 100% verped/customized (ala Lyris's footers, at the minimum), I'm not worrying about the added overhead (you could potentially do batches through an interface). using sockets means the clients can go off-machine for free, as long as they know where to look.

If the number of slow addresses at any instant exceed N th entire system stops for that period. The benefit of parallelisation in this case is that in *general* traffic will cotniue to flow given one or more bad addresses, and the assumption is that the rate of bad/slow addresses will never/rarely coincide to the point that the entire queue is bogged.

now, maybe it could be something like that, a controlling process that uses both threads and forks (and perhaps remote commands through rsh or ssh) to spawn instances as needed...

I see this as orthogonal to Mailman or the MLM process. You could drop such a solution transparently into the outbound queue process.