[JDEV] Re: Large scale Jabber bots

[Jens Alfke]

On Friday, May 25, 2001, at 10:35 AM, David Waite wrote:

> If I had an open system such as hotmail, I
> wouldn't want people to be able to create accounts and send out email to
> 400-500 people at a time

OK, that's different from what you said before. What you actually mean 
is "mailservers run for end users by ISPs or portals", not just 
"mailservers". That's clearly a policy decision for the people running 
the server, not a technical issue. I'm not interested in the policy 
issues here; that's already covered by various tunable settings in 
jabber.xml.

> I also know that the majority of bots do not
> require presence information at all, all users do is query their 
> services.

An IM bot is going to get added to people's rosters so they can send 
messages to it, so the roster bloat will inevitably be just as you 
described.

Also, the point I initially made on this thread is that if you want a 
bot (like a freshmeat announcer) sending you IMs, it is a much better 
model to tie this to a Jabber subscription rather than having to invent 
your own higher level subscription model involving sending magic IMs to 
it (whose syntax people will inevitably mess up or forget.) Let's not 
introduce all the same problems that listservs have.

> If you are running a server, do you want some user to connect,
> advertise their client as a bot, and start taking up memory and CPU 
> usage to
> the scale described below?

In the case of "some random user", clearly not. As I said above, this is 
a policy decision, not a technical one. In cases where the server and 
the bot belong to the same organization, this might be a fine idea.

> I'm saying that you can't take protocol decisions made for an average 
> roster
> size of 10 and scale it to a roster size of a quarter million.

I don't see any protocol decisions here that don't scale. It sounds like 
purely a server implementation issue.

> If you are giving out a user address as the bot, it is a user; it 
> cannot be
> farmed, it cannot be distributed. Again, it has to be attacked another 
> way.

Again, is that an intrinsic limitation of the protocol, or just with the 
design of the current server?

—Jens
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