Bill Cole <asrg3(_at_)billmail(_dot_)scconsult(_dot_)com> wrote:
John Leslie wrote, On 2/18/09 5:59 PM:
John Levine <johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:
[...]
None of this is new, this was all worked out a decade ago. But it's
all still way too slow to keep up with an interesting amount of e-mail.
Have you perhaps not noticed Moore's Law at work these last ten years?
CPU power is not likely to be the critical bottleneck for a system that
has to do large numbers of transactions across the Internet.
Actually, CPU power _can_ be a bottleneck, though seldom the critical
one.
Moores' law also applies to RAM. It has become somewhat practical to
address a terabyte of RAM. This eliminates storage latency, for all
practical purposes, which usually _is_ the critical bottleneck.
Network latency is particularly resistant to Moore's law or anything
like it.
Agreed, but network _bandwidth_ has benefited substantially from
Moore's law.
The bottom line is, redeeming a million tokens per second is practical
with processing delay not much greater than network latency. (This was
not true ten years ago...)
--
John Leslie <john(_at_)jlc(_dot_)net>
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