Pros and cons using IDLED?

[Ken Murchison]

Simon Matter wrote:
> 
> Ken Murchison schrieb:
> >
> > Simon Matter wrote:
> > >
> > > I have enabled compilation of idled in my newest RPM but am wondering
> > > whether that was a good idea. I have two questions:
> > >
> > > 1) I was searching the archives and docs but still can't find a
> > > description of the advantages and drawbacks when using idled instead of
> > > poll. What are the drawback of possible problems I may face when using
> > > idled?
> >
> > Being the guy that wrote idled, I guess I have to answer  ;)
> >
> > The main advantage of idled versus polling is that you get event-driven
> > instant notification of message changes (new, delete, flag changes, etc)
> > in your client when IDLEing (light load on the server, because it only
> > checks the mailbox when told to).  With polling, you can can updates as
> > fast as 1 sec, but you can beat the crap out of the server if you have a
> > lot of users polling that much.
> >
> > The downside of using idled is that it might not scale well.  I haven't
> > received any input from a large site using idled.
> >
> > Keep in mind that idled (or polling) is only used when the client issues
> > the IDLE command.  The only mainstream client that I'm aware of that
> > uses IDLE is Outlook.
> 
> Thanks. So it means it's only interesting in an Outlook environment for
> now.

Like I said, Outlook is the only client that I'm aware of that supports
IDLE.  There may be others which support it that would take advantage of
idled.  For the most part, I think clients do their own polling via
NOOP.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
716-662-8973 x26      Orchard Park, NY 14127
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