[Mailman-Users] Can one use EC2 for bandwidth spikes?

[Brad Knowles]

On 11/4/07, Brad Knowles wrote:

>On 11/4/07, Chuck Peters wrote:
>>   What is required to make this work properly?
>
>  From the Mailman side, they need to accept your port 25 connections,
>  and queue and deliver the outgoing messages.

There's one other factor to consider.  Handling Internet e-mail is 
still an I/O bound process, primarily limited by synchronous 
meta-data operation capacity at the two respective ends, which 
basically boils down to how fast the disk structure can create new 
files in the directory, process those files, and then delete them 
again -- billions and billions of times over.

The kind of computer farm that Amazon has created is good for 
handling compute-intensive tasks.  It will be much less useful for 
general I/O-intensive tasks.

Moreover, the Amazon computer farm will be virtually worthless for 
the specific kinds of tasks that we have to deal with when handling 
Internet e-mail, because the kinds of high-density rack-mount servers 
they're going to use will be critically short on the one thing we 
need most above all else -- low-latency disk drive subsystems which 
can handle a high rate of synchronous meta-data operations.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>