phk malloc, was (Re: ptmalloc2)

[Dan Melomedman]

Jonathan Dama wrote:
> All SMTP implementations I know of do the following:
> 
> All received messages are recorded on disk before they are
> acknowledged as received.
> 
> If the server dies for any reason, it resumes its work based
> on the on-disk record.
> 
> Other messages are obviously resent by the originator.
> 
> I might be wrong, but this might even be in the SMTP spec.
> 
> -Jon

You are right about email servers, but MessageWall is different. It
doesn't save messages to disk. It probably should though. As long as it
doesn't return OK to the remote end unless the message is scanned,
and actually forwarded to the real email server, it will only
cause a message to be resent, but I don't want the proxy to crash for
the reasons I stated earlier. It will crash randomly if it doesn't get
the memory, and admin will have no idea why.

Another example could be 'dnscache'. It also preallocates the cache
database of user-configurable size at the start-up. It never writes
anywthing to the disk, and it doesn't need to, but I wouldn't want it
to crash because the OS won't have the physical memory it needs on
random basis.

Let's stop here then. The feature I am looking for doesn't come with
Unix by default, beaten horse, etc.