On Mon, 6 Sep 2004, Maykel Moya wrote:
> Does Philips have plan to split exim binary from monolithic to more
> binarys ala postfix/qmail in long term, in order to reduce footprint ?
Other people have already made valid points about binary size vs memory
usage and about reducing the binary size by compiling only what you
need.
My answer to the question is "No". People might be interested to learn
that when I first started writing Exim, I did think about writing it as
a number of separate binaries: one for receiving a message, one for
delivering a message, etc. But I soon realized that if I was going to
implement address verification, the "receive" code needed most of the
"deliver" code to be available (at least the routing part). And it also
needed the "outgoing SMTP" functions in order to handle ident (and later
on, callouts needed this too). I therefore changed my mind, and made a
single binary. This also has the advantage that you can upgrade it just
by moving a symbolic link without stopping your email service - you
don't have the problem of keeping multiple binaries in step with each
other.
Now, it is fair to say that Exim has got a huge amount bigger than it
originally was back in 1995. I didn't really envisage this. The 500K or
so that is typical now is about double what it used to be. On the other
hand, disk sizes and physical memory have probably more than doubled in
that time too.
--
Philip Hazel University of Cambridge Computing Service,
ph10@??? Cambridge, England. Phone: +44 1223 334714.
Get the Exim 4 book: http://www.uit.co.uk/exim-book
