Date: Sun, 16 Dec 2001 07:11:32 +0100 From: "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@freebie.atkielski.com> To: "Terry Lambert" <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: "Valence Logrus" <valence@symboliq.org>, <advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Hotmail _still_ runs FreeBSD! Message-ID: <002c01c185f8$82bef1e0$0a00000a@atkielski.com> References: <20011215041054.H40531-100000@arctic.icelab.net> <030701c18575$2ca87570$0a00000a@atkielski.com> <3C1B7A33.D05FA85A@mindspring.com>
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Terry writes: > For the sake of argument, let's say HotMail does > have 60 million subscribers. So they claim, IIRC. > Running custom designed MTA software would drop > the number of machines required significantly. > For example, you aren't relaying any inbound > email: everything is local delivery. How do you ensure that everything is local delivery if you have multiple machines? With 120 machines and load balancing that can accept a message to anyone on any machine, less than 1% of incoming messages will arrive on a machine that is also the destination server of the messages. So 99% of messages will have to be rerouted to a different machine. And what about users retrieving mail? How do you make sure that each user goes to the correct server? Either the client must know which server to access, or all traffic must be funneled through the same server, although you could load balance over those servers. > ... the web interface could even contact the > remote server directly, should a given email be > for one or more recipients constrained to a single > target site. How do you handle relaying restrictions? If the web machine contacts another system directly, unless it has at least an MX record pointing to itself--which it cannot have, since it cannot handle incoming mail. Unless I'm overlooking something in relaying checks. > You'd still want a lot of machines to front end > the web interfaces, particularly since the CGI's > have become incredibly complicated for no good > user interface or business reasons (unless you > count forcing the use of custom controls "a good > business reason"). The CGIs are complicated because Microsoft is a software company that bloats almost everything it produces with lots of additional code. I've complained to them about this before, pointing out that not every single page on every single Microsoft site needs to be an ASP, but my complaints fall upon deaf ears. There are lots of people at MS who like to code, and so they write code whether it is needed or logical or not. > FWIW: The FreeBSD servers are pretty much > limited to DNS and other infrastructure pieces, > rather than customer facing code. How did you determine this? I've never heard FreeBSD being discussed, although it would not surprise me if it were used for such functions. > Actually, Exchange would be fairly easy to fix > to handle that type of load, though you would need > some cooperation from the NT/2000/XP developement > team to optimize a couple of rough corners that are > obvious bottlenecks to scalability on that order. Last time I heard (about two years ago), Exchange had been scaled to perhaps 10 million users in lab experiments, but that is still six times less than required for Hotmail. Exchange is an enormously feature-rich system that gobbles resources on a per-account basis. It also relies far too much on monolithic databases that have no integrity features built in, making recovery after failure a serious problem as they grow. I shudder to think how long it would take to restore a 10-million-user database in Exchange, and unless something changed dramatically in the most recent version, restoring the database is the _only_ way to recover from data loss or corruption. > Surprising as this is... Microsoft has Microsoft > source code. Surprising as this is, Microsoft can't always afford to modify its own code. Building a Hotmail-specific version of Exchange is not economically feasible. If it doesn't run with the stock version of Exchange (and apparently attempts to make it do so in the past have failed), then it can't run on Exchange at all. > I rather expect that the main reason they have > not done more to get away from FreeBSD/Solaris > is a resource/reward issue. Maybe, although they should be able to make anything work if they throw enough hardware at it. If they wanted to force use of Exchange for political reasons, and if the product scaled acceptably, they could just add machines until it worked. Certainly Exchange architecture theoretically facilitates this, but perhaps it doesn't work well beyond a certain point in practice (I don't recall exactly _why_ Exchange didn't work for Hotmail). In any case, not using Exchange for Hotmail is not really a bad reflection on Microsoft; it is such a specific and unusual mail application that it would be unreasonable to expect anything to scale to handle it out of the box. > They are probably incredibly short handed, > at this point ... Everything connected with MSN has always been somewhat of a loss for Microsoft, although I suppose they technically make money on it. Obviously they cannot make much money with a free service like Hotmail directly. > If I could do the migration to Windows, then they could > do the migration to Windows... When was the last time you migrated a 60-million-user e-mail system to Windows? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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