Date: Thu, 1 Nov 2007 08:47:52 -0700
From: "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>
To: Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>
Cc: Andrew Sullivan <ajs@crankycanuck.ca>, pgsql-www@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: what is up with the PG mailing lists?
Message-ID: <20071101084752.64ac3936@scratch>
In-Reply-To: <4729F105.30704@hagander.net>
References: <25716.1193887595@sss.pgh.pa.us>
	<DADF296033D290EF9634F611@ganymede.hub.org>
	<26669.1193891360@sss.pgh.pa.us> <47299585.7030402@hagander.net>
	<47299957.5020605@postgresql.org> <2968.1193919208@sss.pgh.pa.us>
	<20071101080959.49f3087b@scratch>
	<20071101152333.GM27676@crankycanuck.ca>
	<4729F105.30704@hagander.net>
Organization: Joshua D. Drake
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On Thu, 01 Nov 2007 16:30:13 +0100
Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:

> > 1.	All the mail RFCs are totally clear that latency is to be
> > expected in the mail system.  Every time I hear complaints about
> > mail latency that entails delays of merely hours, I worry that
> > people are treating SMTP as though it's XMPP.  It ain't, and it's
> > designed _not_ to be.
>=20
> There's a difference between acceptable delay and what we're often
> getting. Sure, SMTP should have latency. But a modern SMTP system
> shouldn't take hours to deliver an email.

Exactly. It is pretty silly to think that a modern, well engineered
system will take hours to deliver mail. It is like people have just
been brow beaten into accepting the poor performance of the lists.

There are exception of course... I run into Exchange not really likely
greylisting for example.

> > 2.	There are plenty of individual relays involved here, and
> > saying "it's slow" without mail headers is no more helpful in
> > demystifying mail issues than are posts to -performance without
> > EXPLAIN ANALYSE output.
>=20
> Sure. But I can tell you that *every single time* I've looked at
> latencies, the problem has been at postgresql.org or hub.org. And in
> my own case, there is just one relay on the way, usually with a
> latency of <5 seconds.
>=20

This is also the case with me and I just gave up because nobody
actually seems to care about how bad the performance really is.

> >> It would be great if the actual sysadmin team had management
> >> ability on the mail servers.=20
> >=20
> > This seems true to me.  More important,
> >=20
> >> Note we still don't have documentation on this stuff
> >=20
> > I think this is a very serious problem.  Some of the issues have
> > been perplexing to diagnose because of the poor documentation.  We
> > talked about this most recently with respect to MX records and
> > higher-preference-number MXes having the user list from the final
> > destination, so that we could generate rejects consistently, IIRC.
>=20
> Can't agree more.
>=20

I wish -core actually realized how good it could be.=20

Thousands of people rely on these lists. We advertise them as the form
of community support. They are, outside of the code our most important
feature that we provide to our community. Yet...=20

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake


> //Magnus
>=20
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>=20


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