Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question
Julian Onions <j.onions@nexor.co.uk> Tue, 01 June 1993 12:47 UTC
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From: Julian Onions <j.onions@nexor.co.uk>
Message-ID: <8307.738931690@nexor.co.uk>
To: " (Erik Skovgaard)" <eskovgaa@cue.bc.ca>
Cc: osi-ds@cs.ucl.ac.uk
In-Reply-To: <9305280040.AA00691@cue.bc.ca>
Subject: Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question
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> Thanks for the info on the new "commercial" version of PP. It is good > to hear that you are making progress. In all fairness, it probably > should have a new name so it is not confused with the free version. As the writer of a large part of the PD PP, I feel rather aggrieved by your sweeping comments about PP being unfit as a general X.400 implementation. If you would like to level specific criticisms I will attempt to respond in a fair and responsible manner. If so, it is probably better done on another list (pp-people@cs.ucl.ac.uk or the iso list). > Although the effort is appreciated, I must tell you that PP is not up to > par with commercial implementations. This rather upsets me, I think this is wholly unjustified (talking just about the PD version for now). PP had the 1988 protocol support at least a year ahead of any commercial version I was aware of. PP is even now shifting many thousands of X.400 messages a day in many sites. I suspect (but have no proof) that PP is probably delivering a significant fraction of the worlds X.400 traffic now. It has been used as a basis for many commercial products too. PP was one of the first implementations to support RFC987, RFC1148 and RFC1327. PP also has many added features to cope with broken commercial implementations, I could list a number of these but the point is PP does over and above what is required in the pursuit of interoperability. Sure PP has its problems, but I would argue they are not much more than any other commerical implementation, and as far as X.400 goes I think we are better than most. We implemented the whole standard, not a subset or a profile, for instance: - It can deal with a queue of 15,000 messages and maintain optimal ordering of message delivery (many systems just can't deal with that sort of volume - due to the linear scanning of queues). Again I haven't seen many commercial systems, but that would be a good stress test. - It can handle the requirement of a message with 32767 recipients, although it takes a while to check all those addresses and requires a lot of memory. - It can handle 128 nested forwarded messages. - It can handle essentially an infinite number of body parts (tested up to 1000) - We've certainly shipped messages in excess of 2Mb in size. > The code is bulky, slow and has > not passed conformance testing. Bulky, yes - I have to agree with that - but you can level that at commercial implementations. You can also point out the huge functionality that PP has (gateways, plug in reformatters, flexible routing, management console ...). It could be reduced in size I'm sure, but not by an an enormous amount without loosing much of its functionality. Slow - what is slow. PP (the public version) has to my knowledge deliver 30,000 messages in a day, over at least a weeks period. Much of this isn't X.400 traffic. Now this is around about 1 message every 3 seconds, day and night sustained to systems all around the world. Of course it can be faster if all messages are being either delivered or routed to a local system. I haven't seen statistics for other systems, but I would be suprised if they are processing orders of magnitude more messages than this. If so, on what hardware (the above figures are for a sun 4/330). Can you give statistics for other commercial systems? I would be quite interested in their throughput in comparison. (I do remember comparing it against sendmail, and although I can't remember the final results I think it was not too far out, especially with big queues). Conformance test - for a public domain system! As I am sure you are aware conformance tests cost real money, $50000 I have heard of. You also need to retest your system everytime you change the software. When PP was put through a conformance test there was relatively little wrong with it (lots of little detail but nothing major). There were some interesting things thrown up, but nothing really of a show stopper nature. Some of the commerical systems we talk to on a daily basis would not pass conformance I am sure, as we have to work around their problems. Its easy to take pot shots at public code. If there were another free competitor, it would be a fairer comparison. Julian.
- Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Tony Genovese
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Eric D. Williams
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Alf Hansen
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Jock Gill
- re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question James (J.K.) Ko
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Tony Genovese
- re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Jock Gill
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Erik Huizer
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Steve Goldstein--Ph +1-202-357-9717
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question James (J.K.) Ko
- re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Tony Genovese
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Eric D. Williams
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Eric D. Williams
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Jon Crowcroft
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Colin Robbins
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Marco A. Hernandez
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Erik Huizer
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Erik Skovgaard
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Steve Kille
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Erik Skovgaard
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Jock Gill
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Jock Gill
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Erik Skovgaard
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Erik Skovgaard
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Alan.Young
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Julian Onions
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Steve Goldstein--Ph +1-202-357-9717
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Jock Gill
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question pays
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Alf Hansen
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Sylvain Langlois
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Eric D. Williams
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Steve Kille
- Re: Yet another X.400 vs SMTP question Erik Skovgaard