On June 24, 1999 at 04:04, Jeff Breidenbach wrote:
MHonArc just processed its one millionth email on my computer.
Wow. You are definitely pushing the limits of MHonArc was designed
for. I should try to squeeze in what you have done at
www.mail-archive.com in my talk at the Perl Conference.
* The risk of an orphaned lock file is too great. It was better to
use -nolock and manage concurrency myself.
In the next release, I have implemented a flock() version of locking
(since Perl 5 is now a requirement for MHonArc). A new resource,
called LOCKMETHOD, allows you to choose the lock method MHonArc should
use. By default, the directory file method will still be used.
I am also trying to make changes so if MHonArc abnormally terminates,
archive files will still be usable. In sum, do file editing more
intelligently.
* It was better to buy RAM than to use -savemem
-savemem is very expensive on performance. Alot of disk I/O is done.
BTW, it is broke in 2.3.x.
* Once in a blue moon, perl processes can crash and core dump.
No big deal if you remember to check process return values.
And would leave a lock on an archive (using MHonArc's locking). The
flock method would/should avoid this problem. I have also beefed up
signal catching to catch the signals that generate core files.
However, there is dependency on how well Perl handles signals, and Perl
has history of problems with its signal handling. I did get a SEGV
once when using Devel::DProf, and to my surprise, Perl actually
executed my signal handler.
Stock redhat linux 5.2:
Upgrading the kernel may provide better performance and allow you to
trim the kernel size to what you need. RedHat has documentation
on how to build a 2.2.x kernel under RH 5.2. There are some RPMs
you have to upgrade for a 2.2.x kernel.
* People can break into a stock system (due to security holes
in software bundled with the OS)
I just recently edited my /etc/inetd.conf to disable logind, rshd,
telnetd, the pop and imap daemons, etc (the stock release has all kinds
of crap enabled). In sum, you can probably comment out all of
/etc/inetd.conf. Sendmail and Apache start up as stand alone daemons,
so they are unaffected by /etc/inetd.conf. If you need to login
remotely, use ssh.
Other:
* There are certain emails which can kill nmh.
I think this is a left-over from MH. Some messages can kill MH also.
Of course, if the message cause MHonArc to die, I definitely want
to know about it.
Thanks for the info,
--ewh
