I am considering fetchmail as a component of a system that needs to
support hundreds and maybe thousands of users, and it needs to poll
their mail servers every two minutes.
Does anyone here have experience using fetchmail with similar requirements?
It seems that a multithreaded fetchmail would be ideal since it could
poll several mail hosts at once, but the fetchmail design notes
(http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/design-notes.html) say...
"Truly concurrent queries to multiple hosts
Occasionally I get a request for this on "efficiency" grounds. These
people aren't thinking either. True concurrency would do nothing to
lessen fetchmail's total IP volume. The best it could possibly do is
change the usage profile to shorten the duration of the active part of a
poll cycle at the cost of increasing its demand on IP volume per unit time.
If one could thread the protocol code so that fetchmail didn't block on
waiting for a protocol response, but rather switched to trying to
process another host query, one might get an efficiency gain (close to
constant loading at the single-host level).
Fortunately, I've only seldom seen a server that incurred significant
wait time on an individual response. I judge the gain from this not
worth the hideous complexity increase it would require in the code."
--
James Thornton
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Internet Consultant, http://jamesthornton.com