Subject: Re: Replacement of /bin/mail with Procmail v3.10

From: [email-masked] (Stephen R. van den Berg)
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 1995 20:57:00 +0100

Randall Gressett <[email-masked]> wrote:
>I am currently testing the latest sendmail V8 code with procmail v3.10 as 
>my local delivery agent.

>I have had no problems with procmail as my delivery agent, but I have 
>noticed that it takes considerably longer to process mail when compared to 
>/bin/mail.

There are two things that could be causing this:
1. Procmail, by default, throws in a one second pause after writing the
   first character of the mail into the mailbox.  This to make sure that
   things like finger and xbiff still get correct mtime and atime information
   even if the mailbox is NFS mounted.
2. Kernel locks can be very slow, depending on the kernel implementation
   (a major bottleneck can be an NFS mounted mailbox).

>Is there any way to improve the processing performance?

You can eliminate the one-second delay by defining NO_NFS_ATIME_HACK in the
config.h file before compiling procmail.

You can turn off any number of kernel locking methods by defining the
appropriate NO_..._lock macro(s) before compiling procmail.  Note that
you have to make sure that your mail readers use dotlocking if you do this.

-- 
Sincerely,                                  [email-masked]
           Stephen R. van den Berg (AKA BuGless).

This is a day for firm decisions!  Or is it?

---

From: Richard Coleman <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jan 1995 15:37:33 -0500

> you have to make sure that your mail readers use dotlocking if you do this.

Which of the commom mailers (mailtool,elm,pine,mh) do dot locking?
I'm currently only using dot locking because other locking styles
caused problems for mailtool (we use both Solaris 2.3 and SunOS 4.1.3).
(Our system mailboxes are NFS mounted).

Richard Coleman          pgp key (keyID 0x71FB29E1) at keyservers (or)
system administrator     finger [email-masked]
[email-masked]  PGP signed/encrypted mail encouraged.