Re: [EXIM] LISA '98 Practicum talk on MTAs

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Author: Paul D. Robertson
Date:  
To: James FitzGibbon
CC: Tom, exim-users
Subject: Re: [EXIM] LISA '98 Practicum talk on MTAs
On Fri, 11 Dec 1998, James FitzGibbon wrote:

> By his own admission, statistical analysis of his "first public run" code
> has 1 bug per 1000 lines. When Postfix is released, there will be an
> estimated 30 bugs in it.


The release is a beta, but it's been the most production-quality alpha code
I've ever encountered. I'd be very surprised if there's 30 bugs in there at
this point in the game, but my setups are generally pretty simple feature
set-wise, and I've only just started playing with the source again after
a couple of months of "other stuff" intervening.

> I think he said this more to say that Postfix has only 30,000 lines of
> code (his next comment was about the NT kernel), but it's still going to
> need a shakedown before it gets adopted in a production environment.


It's already been adopted in production environments. I've been running
it in production for 7 months, since about the third or fourth alpha
release.

We tend to transit between 50-85K messages a day weekdays and about 50K for
the total weekend on the main gateway where it's running. Given the other
places it runs at my site besides the main gateway, It's handled more than 10
million messages to date in production at my site alone. I'm doubt I'm the
busiest site that was in on the alpha, or the only one who put it in
production a little early.

That said, I expect that anyone who's interested will evaluate it
themselves based on their own criteria. I don't expect it's going to
change anyone's mind that it works in a few places, and it'd be pretty
irresponsible for folks not to do their own evaluations if they're at all
interested in its features. It does introduce some interesting features
in a mail system, and it still has some evolution left to go.

This is off-topic for exim-users though, so anyone who's interested in my
experiences should probably follow-up directly. I understand mailing
lists will be available in a couple of days at www.postfix.org for those
interested in using the MTA.

It'd be a pretty boring world if everyone used the same thing though,
heck I get bored using the same thing everywhere (which starts to explain
the mass of hardware here).

Paul
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Paul D. Robertson      "My statements in this message are personal opinions
proberts@???      which may have no basis whatsoever in fact."
                                                                     PSB#9280



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