RE: TI-H: Out of order...


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RE: TI-H: Out of order...




> Has anyone noticed that since we got a moderator, the posts have been
coming
> out of order?

This is not because of the post moderation. The reason is the large
amount of mails.
When a mail is received that is destined from the mailinglist, it is
first checked against a few rules (like it has to have a From header, it
can't be more than 30,000 lines and some things like that). When that is
done, it is fed to sendmail, which handles the deliveries. Each messages
ends up being a single sendmail "envelope" (yes, I'm looking at products
splitting it into several envelopes for faster processing). Sendmail
then (yes, this is inefficient) delives that envelope synchronosly. That
means, it sends it off to one recipient at a time. And since there are a
lot of flakey mailservers (not to mention flakey network connections)
out there, this does not always take the same amount of time. So it is
possible for a message that was received later to be delivered earlier,
if the first "queue-delivery" has hung on somebodys server that does not
respond fast enough (but the second queue gets a fast response - and
yes, this happens all the time).
I'm afraid that the way sendmail is built, I see no easy way around
this. Splitting the envelopes would give better performance, but not
necessarily help this problem.

//Magnus
List Administrator