[Mailman3-dev] Re: [Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll

[Brad Knowles]

At 3:46 PM +0100 2004-08-27, Richard Barrett wrote:

>  I said "switch to a backup server". Hot server, warm standby. When
>  primary fails, then and only then, does the standby takes over so
>  there is no contention in normal operation.

	Speaking only for myself, even with just one machine on NFS, I've 
seen serious locking problems (among other things), just in terms of 
internal contention with itself and not having to do with any other 
machines trying to access the same data at the same time.


	NFS is fine for certain types of operations, but anything 
requiring real-time or near real-time access where multiple processes 
(either on the same machine or on different machines) may be trying 
to access the same data, is a real area of serious heartburn.

	Spools and queues just don't work well on NFS, although if you 
use various hashing techniques and the semi-atomic file creation 
trick, you can kinda-semi-sorta work around the worst of these 
issues, most of the time.  Of course, there is a significant 
performance hit that you take for going this route.


	All IMO, of course.

>  My concern is getting a heavy duty solution which will work with a
>  database of my choice, i.e. one I have learned to love, trust and
>  manage, which I can nominate at install time.

	Agreed.

>  I am all for that, so that I can stop extending and maintaining my
>  patches to integrate htdig and MHonArc with MM 2.1.x for these
>  latter purposes.

	Understood.  You've done a great deal of service to the community 
through your various patches, and your efforts are strongly 
appreciated!

	That said, I can certainly understand why you'd like to stop 
maintaining them.  I've got a few programs myself that I am 
officially responsible for, but which I'd really kinda rather they 
come to a quick and violent death so that I didn't have to look at 
them or think about them any more.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.