> Experience from classic email - where orders of magnitude more messages are > processed - tells us that polling an account as a rule takes much less than a > second, and that it is indeed absolutely acceptable - even preferable.
Yes, but that's polling one account (or maybe 5 accounts for those with lots of accounts) using POP.. the actual delivery of the email to my mailbox is not done with polling but by the sending mail server pushing it to my account using SMTP.. I think Ross' point was that it is impractical to poll every medical facility in australia looking for pertinent results, much the same way I don't poll every POP server on the internet hunting for my email.. I agree though that we should learn from how email has done things - in particular, in SMTP the sender always takes responsibility for the delivery of the email - so it will keep attempting to send messages until it reaches timeout, all the while informing back to the originator if it is having problems. Why couldn't a path lab system keep attempting to initiate a connection to the GP system "web service" every 10 minutes until it successfully hands off the result?? Surely that would handle the unreliability of the australian internet without resorting to hub and spoke models? Andrew _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
