Re: qpsmtpd

[email protected] (Jason R. Mastaler) writes:

> [ ... ]
>
> So I'm thinking of writing my own SMTP proxy, using some of the
> techniques I've learned over the past few years working on a terascale
> message passing library at my day job, for example --
>
> - Concurrency, using very lightweight (non-OS) threads, and where
>   processes communicate using asynchronous message passing without
>   sharing memory.  This would allow for great scalability out of the
>   box on a single server, and optionally a distributed configuration
>   where you could run the software on multiple servers, or "nodes",
>   and the workload would be distributed amongst them transparently.
>
> - First class fault tolerance, using process monitoring, and in a
>   distributed installation where processes would fail-over to other
>   nodes and then automatically migrate back to recovered nodes.
>
> - Incremental code loading and "hot swapping" so that the software
>   never needs to be HUP'd, stopped or restarted.  Configurations can
>   be changed, new plugins removed or inserted, and even the software
>   itself upgraded to a new version without stopping it.  It'll be
>   designed to "run forever", except for hardware or electrical
>   failures.
>
> Now the question is whether I'll ever have the time to start such a
> beast.  :-)

Well, if you do have time, I think that this would be an amply
worthwhile project.

Are you thinking of replacing the yucky perl code with yucky python
code? :) ... or would it be in C with the plugins being native,
dynamically loaded modules?

Seriously, I don't think that python is all that yucky.  I'm just
wondering how scalable such a proxy would be if it was written in an
interpreted language.


-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 [email protected]
 God bless you.