Big site architecture related things

[Jonathan Stowe]

On Sat, 2007-11-10 at 16:52 +0000, Lyle - CosmicPerl.com wrote:
> Edmund von der Burg wrote:
> > Thinking about the recent discussions on this ML about big sites and
> > so on these links came to mind. I present them for your delectation:
> >
> > A discussion by Chris Lightfoot on the guts of the downing street
> > petition site (the one that had the million signatures for the road
> > changing petition early this year). This is also good because the code
> > that runs the site is available to look at:
> >
> >   http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/
> >   http://www.mysociety.org/2006/12/08/under-the-bonnet/
> >   https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/dir?d=mysociety/pet     # the code
> >   
> 
> I've been looking through this, especially at the daemons. My main 
> question at this stage, is why petemaild 
> <https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/getfile/mysociety/pet/bin/petemaild> 
> doesn't use Net::SMTP? I'm assuming there is a good reason for it. Also 
> is it safe to assume you could have a similar setup on Win32 servers 
> using Win32::Daemon?

>From a cursory inspection it would appear the email sending is
relatively tightly coupled to the queuing and that it uses a select
based mechanism to allow multiple sends to be in progress at once in the
single process.

The three argument select never used to work on windows as it relies on
support from the OS that windows doesn't have. It may have been fixed
since I last looked.

/J\