The Universe of Discourse

More on multiple SMTP connections
[ The previous article is here. ]

Two people so far have written in to ask why I didn't just have the SMTP server delete the lock files when it was done with them. Well, more accurately, one person wrote in to ask that, one other person just said that it would solve my problem to do it.

But I thought of that, and I didn't do it; here's why. The lock directory contains up to 16,843,009 directories that cannot, typically, be deleted. Thus deleting the lock files does not solve the problem; at best it postpones it.

John Macdonald had a better suggestion: To lock address a.b.c.d, open file a/b and lock byte 256·c+d. This might work.

But at this point my thinking on the project is that if a thing's not worth doing at all, it's not worth doing well.

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