Date: 5 Mar 1996 16:36:30 GMT
Message-ID: <19960305163630.4362.qmail@koobera.math.uic.edu>
From: djb@koobera.math.uic.edu (D. J. Bernstein)
To: drums@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: proposed agenda for 8 March WG meeting

> I do that where
> it really helps (that is, where the difference is measureable
> without a stop watch).

Keep in mind that parallelism helps for _every_ recipient. People love
it when, for example, qmail delivers a message to 135 recipients in two
minutes over a slow line. (Just one of the many examples I've been sent
by happy users.)

> Sure, you
> may improve latency by a few seconds (per recipient),

Those few seconds pile up! People send messages to hundreds, even
thousands of recipients. sendmail (even a mythical version of sendmail
that uses pipelining) takes hours to get to the bottom of the list.

> or so, but
> to do that you duplicate the whole message content.  That's insane,
> and a totally stupid waste of bandwidth.

First, the bandwidth loss is insignificant, because most deliveries
are to separate hosts. Collect the statistics on your own site if you
don't believe me.

Second, if you're going to worry about bandwidth, at least get it right:
the duplication of message content is on average much less important
than the number of extra packets.

Third, Netscape has (correctly) decided that this isn't insane, even
though in their case there _is_ a noticeable overall bandwidth loss,
because THAT'S WHAT THE USERS WANT.

> The gain isn't worth the cost.

At least you've realized that there's a comparison to be made.

---Dan