re: performance, any smtp mail server worth its salt will be limited by I/O write performance (email should be sync'd to stable storage before signalling acceptance). CPU spent pushing data over pipes/unix sockets won't register. I don't see any measurements in there, so it sounds like "X Windows is slow because it has to talk over a socket" analysis.
"The short version: Classes and methods beats pipes and processes."
Well, it depends. For latency on when processing a single large email, yes, perhaps. One-pass processing will give you that (although I think he skipped over how SoS manages to hand off incoming email to SpamAssassin without "passing it over a pipe to a perl process")? Surely we are trying to compare like with like, right?
But mail processing is a parallel activity. Reducing latency on a single message is not the same thing as improving throughput. What do we find out about that?
"But, sendmail and postfix are still way better at huge scale bulk, so it relays to them."
Ah, OK. So this is a boutique solution, for personalised handling of small-site stuff. Guess what? We already have that, since (as noted by the spamassassin example) you can set up the big solutions to hand off a message to you to process in the language of your choice.
Sorry for -ve rant. I didn't see any -ve comments in this section and wanted a little critical balance. Nice software is always nice, and you don't have to have a reason to want to write it.
But I don't like unjustified justifications. If you're going to claim better performance, give numbers.
"The short version: Classes and methods beats pipes and processes."
Well, it depends. For latency on when processing a single large email, yes, perhaps. One-pass processing will give you that (although I think he skipped over how SoS manages to hand off incoming email to SpamAssassin without "passing it over a pipe to a perl process")? Surely we are trying to compare like with like, right?
But mail processing is a parallel activity. Reducing latency on a single message is not the same thing as improving throughput. What do we find out about that?
"But, sendmail and postfix are still way better at huge scale bulk, so it relays to them."
Ah, OK. So this is a boutique solution, for personalised handling of small-site stuff. Guess what? We already have that, since (as noted by the spamassassin example) you can set up the big solutions to hand off a message to you to process in the language of your choice.
Sorry for -ve rant. I didn't see any -ve comments in this section and wanted a little critical balance. Nice software is always nice, and you don't have to have a reason to want to write it.
But I don't like unjustified justifications. If you're going to claim better performance, give numbers.