Wormhole Instability (was Why do things keep changing?)

Bruce ONeel beoneel at mindspring.com
Wed Jun 6 11:11:23 UTC 2001


Hi,
	In one of my past lives I ran a load of email lists via different
list processors.  It is suprising how hard this is to get running 
well.  You'd think it would be easy, but, you want to distribute
an inbound message out to multiple outbound processes and
then those multiple out bound processes try to send the mail
out.  On a high traffic mail list you eassily can get replies
going out before the origional message goes out just by having
one of the outbound process hang trying to contact someone's
inbound email server.  And you can easily get multiple copies 
if the last little bit of the SMTP protocol is dropped on the floor
by TCP.  Sigh..

  Another choice is to force single threading, ie, one message is
delivered to the whole list of users before the next message is 
delivered.  On a list of any size this will result in very few 
messages per day since some node on the list is always 
disconnected and requires a timeout and wait for N minutes to
retry.

  Oh yea, the number of bounces, even from well connected nodes
is stunning.

  Kudos to teh uiuc folks :-)

cheers

bruce


"Jarvis, Robert P. \(Contingent\)" <Jarvisb at timken.com> wrote:
> Ouch - that came out harsher than I meant.
> 
> To be fair to the people at UIUC, who have been incredibly generous in the
> support of the Squeak and Smalltalk communities, my observation is that
> *ALL* list servers have problems.
> 
> Bob Jarvis
> Compuware @ Timken
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jarvis, Robert P. (Contingent) 
> > Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2001 8:17 AM
> > To: 'squeak at cs.uiuc.edu'
> > Subject: RE: Wormhole Instability (was Why do things keep changing?)
> > Importance: High
> > 
> > 
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: JArchibald at aol.com [mailto:JArchibald at aol.com]
> > > Aha! Now I understand Fleeberz's comment: "I've only had a 
> > > few bounces in the last 17 years or so". 
> > > 
> > > THEY ARE BOTH WRITING TO US FROM SEVENTEEN YEARS IN THE FUTURE.
> > > AND THE MAILING LIST IS STILL SCREWING UP !!!
> > 
> > Yes, well...isn't it nice to know that despite the ups and 
> > the downs, the
> > vicissitudes of life, the general tendency towards chaos and 
> > anarchy, and
> > the lack of a good five cent cigar, one can count on some 
> > things and say,
> > "Well, no matter what else may happen you can always count on 
> > the Squeak
> > list server to have problems".  It's rather endearing, really...  :-)
> > 
> > Bob Jarvis
> > Compuware @ Timken
> >





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list