Re: [Asrg] About that e-postage draft [POSTAGE]

[John Leslie <john at jlc.net>]

Bill Cole <asrg3 at billmail.scconsult.com> wrote:
> John Leslie wrote, On 2/18/09 5:59 PM:
>>John Levine <johnl at taugh.com> wrote:
> [...]
>>> None of this is new, this was all worked out a decade ago.  But it's
>>> all still way too slow to keep up with an interesting amount of e-mail.
>>
>> Have you perhaps not noticed Moore's Law at work these last ten years?
> 
> CPU power is not likely to be the critical bottleneck for a system that
> has to do large numbers of transactions across the Internet.

   Actually, CPU power _can_ be a bottleneck, though seldom the critical
one.

   Moores' law also applies to RAM. It has become somewhat practical to
address a terabyte of RAM. This eliminates storage latency, for all
practical purposes, which usually _is_ the critical bottleneck.

> Network latency is particularly resistant to Moore's law or anything
> like it.

   Agreed, but network _bandwidth_ has benefited substantially from
Moore's law.

   The bottom line is, redeeming a million tokens per second is practical
with processing delay not much greater than network latency. (This was
not true ten years ago...)

--
John Leslie <john at jlc.net>