Excerpts from mail: 6-Jul-94 Re: e-mail over AFS ! Marc
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (661)
> If you have a large site (I'm originally from MIT :-), wouldn't writes
> to this volume take forever due to the number of callbacks involved?
> Or is DFS different in this respect? That's the major concern we have
> with storing mail spools in AFS.
Ideally you wouldn't be writing to a single volume. DFS should allow
each name in the spooling area to be an individual fileset, shouldn't
it? Callbacks could then be distributed among a number of servers.
Additionally, I think where AMS took its biggest performance hit wasn't
in the mail service per se, but in integrating BBSs and netnews into a
common massaging system. When hundreds of individuals browsed thousands
of files from common volumes, you had tremendous strain on the servers
-- especially since the BBSs were dynamic and writable, enforcing
callbacks from all active clients whenever a news article changed.
The one unavoidable bottleneck in distributing a large-scale mail
service within DFS might be in serializing new mail delivery.
Optimally, you'd like to use a single address for mail delivery, which
means that a single host would be responsible for injecting everybody's
new mail into DFS. I'd think that this could still scale to thousands
of uses -- but tens of thousands? Another dubious area is in checking
for new mail arrival. AMS employs a slick method of checking for new
mail without involving direct server access. How might thousands of
users continuously check for new mail in DFS without everybody polling
the servers?
