Re: A question about Milters and Thread Safety

From: Ronald F. Guilmette (no email)
Date: Mon Sep 03 2007 - 15:19:04 EDT

  • Next message: Wietse Venema: "Re: Using virtual_alias_domains"

    In message <>,
     (Wietse Venema) wrote:

    >Ronald F. Guilmette:
    >> Anyway, recently I got to wondering: Do milter programs that are
    >> only going to be used in conjunction with Postfix (and _not_ any
    >> other kind of mail server, e.g. Sendmail) really need to be thread-
    >> safe?
    >
    >Yes, it needs to be thread safe. This means jumping hoops when
    >you maintain persistent data structures, global variables. It
    >also means you can't call functions that aren't thread safe.

    Yes, that's what I thought it meant.

    Ugg! I hate to have to do all of this extra work, just to write a
    rather simple milter.

    Just for the sake of my edification, could you please also tell me
    _why_ a Postfix milter has to be thread safe? I mean Postfix's smtpd
    processes don't actually _use_ separate threads, do they? So where
    does the requirement come from? What would fail if I wrote a non-
    thread-safe milter and tried to use it with Postfix? Would my data
    structures that are updated/modified in a non-thread-safe way really
    become corrupted? If so, how would that happen... even in the total
    absence of multiple threads?

    Signed,
    Perplexed


  • Next message: Wietse Venema: "Re: Using virtual_alias_domains"





    Hosted Email Solutions

    Invaluement Anti-Spam DNSBLs



    Powered By FreeBSD   Powered By FreeBSD