[Spread-users] 1 problem with Spread.pm and 1 problem with spread daemon, was

Tim Peters tim at zope.com
Fri Jan 18 00:33:39 EST 2002


[Tom Mornini, to Guido van Rossum]
> How can you rewrite the app to fix this? It seems like the only way to
> fix it is to: 1) Spread less, or 2) empty mailboxes faster...

Guido responded that we're reworking our protocol (on top of Spread) to
batch up the thousands of very small messages we sometimes send now.  I
think it will still be possible for us to hit the limit, though, just not
nearly as often.  So batching isn't enough.  Fortunately, this part of our
app is receiving messages from a source that's capable of replaying them, so
we can catch the disconnection exception (wee're using a Python wrapper --
none of this "guess what undef might mean" business <wink>) and effectively
restart it, requesting a resend of the msgs just beyond the last one we saw
(something *our* protocol handles, on top of Spread).  I expect the latter
is going to be more painful than batching, though..

Alas, I'm not sure what else the Spread folks can do about this.  For our
specific app, booting a client based on aggregate unread message size, or
even on time of oldest unread, would make a lot more sense than booting it
based on raw count.  But despite that it would be self-serving, I can't
think of any reason that would be universally true (then again, I can't
think of any reason for why raw count is a particularly good criterion
either ...).






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