2011/2/18 ron minnich <[email protected]>:
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 9:32 AM, erik quanstrom <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> wire speed is generally considered "good enough".  ☺

Touche.

> depends on field of use. In my biz everyone hits wire speed, and the
> question from there is: how much of the CPU are you eating to get that
> wire speed.
>
> It's a very tangled thicked.

Indeed. It's very difficult to do SMTP anywhere close to wire speed
with the protocol-required persistent I/O overhead, the typical
content analysis stuff that ISPs, ESPs, and large content providers
tend to want to do. Add on RBL lookups, crypto-related stuff (e.g.
DKIM), etc., it's just not really feasible on commodity hardware. (Of
course, these days, operating systems and RAID controllers with
battery-backed caches make it impossible to guarantee that your
message ever ends up in persistent storage, but that's still a small
part of the processing overhead for a given message.)

--dho

> ron
>
>

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