In message <3jdjvm2k00zj...@spike.porcupine.org>, wie...@porcupine.org (Wietse Venema) wrote:
>Ronald F. Guilmette: >> Somewhere burried in the documentation I vaguely remember seeing a >> comment to the effect that Postfix will only ask a policy server to >> handle 100 requests. (I guess that this is one way of allowing for >> badly written policy servers that have, for example, memork leaks >> or other kinds of problems that would otherwise build up over time.) > >That is incorrect. The text says: > > On active systems a policy daemon process is used multiple > times, for up to $max_use incoming SMTP connections. > >That is, UP TO $MAX_USE INCOMING SMTP CONNECTIONS, not >up to 100 policy server requests. > >Please do read carefully before posting hypotheses and >non-applicable scenarios. OK, I'm reading (and re-reading, and re-re-reading) the statement in question, which appears in the SMTPD_POLICY_README, and I'm sorry to say that I still find it almost imponderably ambiguous. Please clarify your use of the word "use" in this context. What does it mean for a policy daemon to be "used"? If something sends a single request to a policy daemon, and it receives back a properly formatted response from the daemon, isn't that a "use" of the daemon? In what sense is such a single transaction _not_ a "use" of the daemon? Perhaps you and I are working from different dictionaries, but where I come from a _single_ such transaction would be considered a "use" of the daemon. I believe that the vast majority of native English speakers would agree. If you went and obtained cash out of your local ATM 100 times last year, then how many times did you "use" that ATM last year? Once?? If I have failed to grasp that fact that you had some obscure and non-standard meaning in mind for the word "use" in this context, then I do apologize. I shall in future try harder to intuit your intended meanings, even when ordinary everyday English usage would suggest other and more obvious interpretations. In any event, regardless of how this key sentence is construed, it self-evidently leaves open a rather obvious quetion: What happens, exactly, when the $max_use limit is exceeded? The document makes no effort at all to specify, leaving the reader to wonder why this limit was even mentioned at all. It's like as if I I told my friend that I would use my local ATM up to 100 times this year. My friend might then reasonably ask: "Yea, and THEN what?" I now ask the analogous question: What happens after $max_use ? It seems a reasonable question. The document does not provide an answer.
