On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 17:33:21 CST, Thomas Raef said:
> Is it constant corporate rivalries that forced AV companies to "brag" about 
> releasing updates every hour?

Ya know, a few years back, the vendor that does the A/V part of our front-end
email boxes took about 6 hours to get us a pattern that matched a fast-burning
email-based worm.   In those 6 hours, we got pounded by so many copies all
sending themselves to everybody (which is pretty badly synergistic in a mostly
closed community like a .EDU with 50K active mailboxes, and almost every single
one of them has zillions of *other* valid addresses on the same server just
floating around on the drive waiting to be scraped).  How badly?  The backend
system folded under the load when the load average got to 1487 or so, and it
took us several *days* to get a clean restart (it proved to be harder than it
looked to bring up the back end without the front ends dumping several tens of
millions of messages onto the server and pounding it back into the Stone Age).

When 6 or 8 hours of delay means you could have a meltdown with literally
millions of backlogged messages, suddenly "every hour" starts sounding good...

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