On Mon, 11 Oct 1999, Nick Simicich wrote:
> At 02:33 PM 10/11/99 -0700, Jeremy Blackman wrote:
> >As I said, it's just one of my personal quirks that I don't like running
> >large-volume mailing lists as interpreted scripts. I watched someone run
> >a Majordomo list with 1900 users that got 80 posts a day, and it flattened
> >his machine... that was one of the reasons I decided to write Listar in C.
> >:)
>
> Let's think about this for a second. How does Majordomo work? The
> delivery path is....The MTA gets the message and processes it through a
> perl script, resend. The perl script processes in, (let's be real
> generous, here) at most five-six seconds of CPU (that is being pretty
In his case, what was largely the problem was that his Perl was
misconfigured and was trying to parse through a GREAT many more Perl
libraries than was needed. Each invokation of resend took about 5
_minutes_. Believe me, I helped track down and fix the
misconfiguration...it IS possible to do that. It is much HARDER to do
something like that (misconfigure in such a way) under C.
You are, however, correct that sendmail did not aid the situation.
I will also admit I am biased against writing applications in scripting
languages as a general rule, because I've seen some things done very, very
wrong in them. I've seen some things done wrong in C as well, and I've
seen some things done right in scripting languages, but as a general rule
for some reason I feel more like daemons and such should be written in C
or C++ or SOMETHING that compiles and produces a binary.
When I see things on freshmeat like 'HTTP Daemon written in Perl' or 'MTA
written in Perl' or 'FTP client written in shell scripting language', I
just want to run screaming and hide under my desk. :)
> Cows With Guns
Good song. :)
