On 08/20/2014 10:13 PM, Linda Walsh wrote:
Anton Aylward wrote:
On 08/20/2014 07:57 PM, Linda Walsh wrote:
That it takes almost 4x the space is bad enough, but that it 200-300 times slower is the real bear.
That makes no sense. If space were the issue then we would not use HTML mail, it would be banned from all major servers and archives. There would also be a ban on attachments: selfies, lolcats, ftp-by-email of documents and spreadsheets.
That's not space on an ISP... that's local space. Though the peformance hit is worse than the space hit.
So no I don't buy that. I'm not an ISP trying to sell you something.
I know you're not, Linda. I'm not accusing you of being so All I'm saying is geared the needs of a small system, a home system or a SMB. There's lots of documentation out there about all this, both sides of the argument, from oracle, HP, IBM and the like that describe multiple mail gateways, mail hubs mail servers, multitudinous local LANS each with local mail servers and mail readers and mail repositories on each workstation. The stuff that gives me nightmares, but probably makes equipment salesmen have wet dreams about their commissions. As with anything and everything ("Context is Everything") "It all depends". I have multitudes of old 800MHz single core machines with 1G of memory and a 20 or 30G drive courtesy of a desktop replacement scheme. I can run one of those as the 'mail server' under my desk. (Actually right now its acting as a support for my laserjet printer). Slow machine? yes. Single core so no parallelism such as Carlos talks of? Yes. But it doesn't matter. I'm not an ISP, as you point out. Years ago in DrDobb's a leter writer pointed out that the screaming fast compiler race was irrelevant unless you were a piss poor coder who was doing compile-fix-compile-fix cycles. What mattered was the speed of the compiled product. The letter writer said that if he fired up the compiler and went off to get coffee and chat with his colleagues and it was done when he got back, that was fast enough. Of course controversy ensued! But the principle holds. I'm not an ISP. My mail reader - Thunderbird - runs on a nice fast tower workstation (a bit too large and bit too hot for my liking, mind, but it will get upgraded in due course and perhaps will become the mail server: who knows) and talks to nearly half a dozen IMAP servers, one local, the other at various ISPs across Canada, USA and western Europe (nothing in the far east yet). I have a fetchmail for the couple more ISPs that don't support IMAP and have to be fetched using POP. All this on the single core 800MHz Closet of Anxieties Special. It used to run Madriva, then Mageia but now runs openSuse 13.1. There are a lot of things in life that we don't site there waiting for. "The watched kettle never boils", Well great, stick you cup of water in the microwave and go slice your bagel and op it in the toaster and get your creamed cheese out of the fridge and the milk and the teabag out of the jar in the cupboard and all of a sudden, just at the right time, the hot water is ready and the toaster pops up. Its not just parallelism it that you weren't there waiting for one thing. The speed of my mail *does* have to do with when the mail is ready on the remote ISP. That in turn depends on when *you* choose to write a reply. Al that dwarfs any time my CPU may spend. Programmers are advised to properly metricise (?sp? 'metricate' ?) their code before optimizing. There's no point in optimizing a non-critical part of the application. Just so here. The speed of processing we're talking about, issues of space, are not only context dependent (e.g. with ReiserFS doing space packing issue of waster block space are irrelevant, issues of i-node exhaustion as with ext3/4 are irrelevant; I'm sure you can make a similar case with XFS) but from the POV of the person reading the email are all irrelevant. We have many complaints about our mail readers and as Microsoft and the Joe Sixpack style purchasers and user, he kind of bickering we're engaging in is why we get labelled 'geeks' and often marginalized by the people who keep the lifeblood of the company - the money - flowing: sales and marketing. -- If I still had 8" floppy drives I'd be much more concerned about hardware failures, storage capacity and performance issues than BS viruses. -- Bill Campbell, CISM, CISSP, March 2007 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org