Thank you for your detailed explantaion.
On Tue, 28 Oct 2003 19:35:01 +0530, Madan Ganesh Velayudham said:
Yes, I understand RFC 1985, talks about Server and Client
Interaction. And It is not clear when the client should
initiate ETRN.
For SMTP, "client" is always the end starting the connection,
and "server" is the end receiving. This means that the
machine you call your "SMTP server" is actually operating in
both modes all the time - when it accepts inbound mail it
runs in server mode, and (the case you are interested in)
when it sends mail out, it's in client mode.
To avoid this confusion, we usually talk about Mail User
Agents (MUAs - the code that actually talks to the user,
usually on a desktop/laptop/etc), Message Submission Agents
(MSAs - the code that accepts mail from an MUA), Message
Transmission Agents (MTAs - the code that moves mail from
system to system), and Message Delivery Agents (MDAs - the
code that actually gets mail into a user's mailbox). It is
quite common for one piece of software to do multiple parts
of this process.
Yes, I understand them clearly. I take care of MTA/MDA/MUA
on HP-UX.
My comment is about when the SMTP server brings up, it should
inform its neighbour SMTP servers.
When your MTA comes up, it may want to connect to its
neighbor MTAs in client mode and issue an ETRN to tell them
that it is now up, and to initiate a queue run on the
neighboring boxes now rather than at the next scheduled time.
My only concern was I could not get it clearer from the RFC.
As an operational note, this can be *very* dangerous in
high-volume environments if you have multiple neighbors with
large queues., particularly with high-speed network
connections and SMTP Pipeline enabled at both ends.
I may wrong here. Please correct me if I'm.
When a server comes up, a separate thread would take care
sending #INVITE message to its neighbours and Parallely
it can take care other activities.
The basic problem is that most high-volume mail systems are
Unix or Linux based, and often they include the system load
average in the "am I too busy?" calculation. Unfortunately,
said average is time-smoothed, and represents the average
load over the last 1/5/15 minutes. So the server end
receives a client connection, which then starts sending the
mail *very* quickly (it's possible to get well into the
hundreds/second if you try hard), while fork()/exec()ing in
the background to do final delivery. By the time the load
average starts reflecting the problem, the server has already
done dozens/hundreds/thousands of fork/execs and the load
average then proceeds to spike. I've personally seen an IBM
RS6K-250 (1 133mz 601 processor) (our Listserv box at one
time) bring a large 8-CPU Sun (our main mail hub) to its
knees - the fact that the
*average* number of recipients per message was in the
hundreds didn't help...
Thank you for your sharings. That was a useful note.
+ MG