[tpop3d-discuss] The way locking in /var/mail works...

[Chris Lightfoot]

On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 08:59:27AM +0200, Martin Schmitt wrote:
> Hallo Chris Elsworth,
> dear Chris Elsworth,
> 
> * chris@shagged.org wrote/schrieb:
> 
> > It's the easiest time; keeping the mbox locked for the duration of the
> > sessions makes life a lot easier. It should be technically possible to
> > only lock the mbox when an operation is being performed on it, but you
> > then have to rescan it before every operation - something else might
> > have changed it. This would be performance suicide for large
> > installations, retrieving 2000 messages in a single session would
> > result in 2000 locks being created and subsequently destroyed.
> 
> Well, an option would be to lock the mbox on the first operation after
> login and not to unlock it again until the end of the session. But, again,
> I'm not an expert on POP3 implementation and my view may be somewhat naive.

You could, but it would be a pain to implement, since two
users could then simultaneously be logged in. POP3 doesn't
support this sort of shared access to the mailbox in any
very useful way.

-- 
``A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in
  human history -- with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.''
  (Mitch Ratcliffe, in `Technology Review', 1992)