[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[Barry Warsaw]

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 15:41, J C Lawrence wrote:

> Some years back I talked to Mike Belshe (used to be at Remarq) about
> their storage techniques (I caught him shortly after Critical Path
> bought Remarq).  Keying off other LISA papers they segmented their
> storage space by object size, customising and configuring each segment
> to suit (things like RAID strip size, number of spindles, FS tuning
> parameters, etc).  He asserted that the rewards were very significant.
> 
> However, these are very large archive problems and are a bit outside of
> Mailman's home turf.

Mailman's philosophy is, keep it as simple as possible to handle 80% of
the installations out there, but provide enough framework for the other
20% to extend for extreme uses.  Strategies to accomplish this include
defining interfaces to key components, and shipping something that works
out of the box and is good enough for most people.

It's not always easy, of course, to architect something that scales this
way.  I think we have a pretty good idea of the scaling problems with
Mailman 2, and I hope we can push the envelop significantly for Mailman
3.

-Barry