Talks (was: Re: [YLUG] A basic question)

[Alex Howells]

On 28/12/2007, Steve Kemp <steve at steve.org.uk> wrote:
> > I know I've seen your system ;)  Was curious about other stuff out there too!
>
>   There are other systems, but the problem is that most of them are
>  either big and expensive (messagelabs, etc) or small and hard to
>  judge (antespam.com, etc).
>
>   I guess now that Google allows you to point your MX records at
>  their servers there is another option.  But that is slightly different
>  from the SMTP-proxy idea; since they'd be hosting your mail, not just
>  filtering it en route.

`dig mx 0wn3d.us` :-)  It works fine although there're a few privacy
concerns. Recently they implemented IMAP and have an interesting
connector which translates Labels <-> Folders so it's almost usable in
that regard ;)

Tie together with GnuPG and you're all set really.  If you need GPG
through Firefox, there's FireGPG.

I'm pretty happy with the solution as it doesn't require me to futz
about with anything myself.  That said, all my other domains and
aliases (astinus at gentoo.org) still go through Postfix + Amavis on a
server I manage...

>   If there are only a few places that are critical *and* the code
>  is structured so that you can cleanly wrap a cache-test around them
>  then it is very simple to get started.
>
>   YOu don't need to store everything in the memory cache, but if you
>  do it'll be a lot faster rather than fast in places and slow in others.
>
>   As an example I cache lots of things on the debian-administration.org
>  website.  In the past 21 hours the cache hit + miss numbers are:
>
>     hits  : 6243674
>     misses:  130865

Presumably the more you store in memcached, the more RAM you need?  I
guess combine that with the fact each session takes it's own chunk of
memory, and you're just transferring things; substituting RAM (fast)
for disk access (slow)?

Does this cause scalability issues for something like debian-administration.org?

I guess when you get down to it, memory is quite cheap and you're only
storing each bit of data once....

>   Some items are tiny, such as the mapping between usernames and
>  user IDs.  Other items were the compete text of an article, or the
>  tree representing all the comments posted upon an article.
>  Unfortunately I can't graph the size of the objects!

Shame, that'd make for some pretty graphs ;)

> > Sounds like you'd be a good candidate for giving one of these proposed
> > talks! :-P
>
>   I'm shy... and remote ;)

Pft, you're down here fairly regularly and don't seem shy :P