Re: nobody/nogroup - ITP maildir-bulletin
On Thu, Oct 21, 1999 at 12:44:13PM +0200, Russell Coker wrote:
> It creates a single copy of the message and creates a link to it from each
> home directory. This means that if you have 30000 users on a system and want
> to send them each a 10K message (such as the legalistic stuff many
> universities send all their students nowadays) it will only take 10K of
> storage and a (relatively) small amount of time to deliver. If you deliver it
> any other way it will take 300M of storage and a significant amount of
> delivery time.
> In the system I am mainly writing this for (AIX machine) I expect to deliver
> a bulletin to 30000 accounts in between 10 and 15 minutes and the machine
> will be on 100% CPU time for that period (IBM's JFS really sucks for this
> type of thing - read comp.sys.aix in DejaNews to see the discussion I started
> on Filesystem Performance). If the same mail was delivered using procmail
> then I would expect it to take much more than twice as long. Maybe an hour
> of CPU time.
> Even for systems with less users and better OSs and hardware (such as one of
> my clients running a K6-3 at 350MHz for 1000 users) delivering email to
> everyone can be painfully slow.
>
> Also with my bulletin system it's easy to unsend bulletins and to edit
> bulletins. For example if you send a bulletin to 30000 users telling them
> "the system will be down on Friday" then on Friday evening you can change it
> to "the system was down on Friday" for the users who haven't yet read it.
Sounds a good idea in general.
Several comments:
What happens if the user forwards all mail to another site and/or
wants to filter incoming mail with procmail?
Why is this better then newsgroups, the 'proper' way of passing
bulletins (IMHO)? Don't tell me, I already know the answer: most people
aren't aware of the existance of newsgroups. Perhaps some effort should
be made to change this.
Newgroups are idea for the task (IMHO), as you can read the messages at
your leasure, don't have your incoming mailbox cluttered with unwanted
messages (which the sender will always consider important, but maybe
you disagree), and don't need to run slow mail filtering tasks, such as
procmail.
(another point, with newsgroups, people are more likely to get upset if
you post a message to the group group. For instance, as a Uni postgrad
student, I often get my mailbox full of stuff that only applies to
staff - occasionally somebody complains, but nothing changes).
--
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>
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