Re: [exim-dev] Randomising retry times?

> That sounds extreme and complicated, difficult to explain, and liable to
> errors, for what is a situation case.
>
> Incidentally, I have often argued that the use of backup MX (currently
> going out of favour) is one way to avoid this problem. The pending mail
> collects on the backup and can be transferred in an orderly fashion when
> the primary comes up. Of course, you then have the problem of keeping
> the acceptance rules identical on the backup and the primary, so I can
> see why people don't like backup MX any more. There are problems both
> ways.

My problem is not with mail from outside, but inside the cluster.

Think of it as ethernet: It uses exponential backoff, but takes a random
number within the backoff interval. That way it gets rid of the situation
that two stations always collide.

And that's pretty much my problem, so I thought about solving it just
the same. I can see a use for fixed retry intervals, but does anybody
really care about a geometric interval being met exactly? I think people
use it for the exponential backoff character, not caring about the exact
interval as long as it keeps growing. Using it as interval for a random
value keeps that character, and avoids retry collions.

Michael