On Thu, 22 Aug 2002, Brad Knowles wrote:
Here are two examples. I have seen email with 20+ minutes delay even on the last hop to me, though in the first example it was only 4-5 minutes. In the first example most of the delay is within merit, on the last one the majority of the delay is from trapdoor to my box.
But we don't know what the *cause* is of the delay between Merit & your box. That might be caused by network problems between the two points, your box temporarily being unavailable, or whatever.
The cause is overload. There is a definate relation between amount of mail going thru the list handling system and the delay. When there are a lot of email being posted the delay is longer. I also notice that you ignored the 20 minute delay within the mailinglist delivery system: Received: by trapdoor.merit.edu (Postfix) id 1EDD29138D; Wed, 21 Aug 2002 17:10:18 -0400 (EDT) <cut> Received: from segue.merit.edu (segue.merit.edu [198.108.1.41]) by trapdoor.merit.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5D91191313 for <nanog@trapdoor.merit.edu>; Wed, 21 Aug 2002 16:50:00 -0400
We just don't have enough information to make a determination as to whose fault this problem is.
Well, I am convinced that the problem lies in the way the list is set up or the software chosen. I checked approx 50 nanog-l email and almost no email is delivered to me within 5 minutes on this list, when there are 3-5 messages being posted in quick succession the delivery time quickly goes up to 10-15+ minutes. All the replies to the .mil email took 10+ minutes to deliver, most of them 20 minutes, that's why there were so many replies because people just did not see each others replies. All the answers to the original post were done within a 30 minute window (the first one 13 minutes after the original post) so there are quite a few people seeing long delivery times here. I am on mailing lists with many hundreds of people at other places and normal delivery time there is sub-minute. I see no technical reason today why an important list like nanog-l should reside on a mailing list platform where 10+ minute delivery time is reached in 20+ % of the cases and reached immediately when there is any load or moderate usage, and sub-5-minute delivery is reached in less than 20% of the cases. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se