The Dada Mail Homepage Blog

The Dada Mail Homepage Blog http://dadamailproject.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/list/homepage_blog/ This is a Dada Mail List, used for the sole function of makin' a blog for our homepage. No need to subscribe, just read it on http://dadamailproject.com or subscribe to the newsfeed! en-us Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:54:00 GMT Pro Dada 4.9.1 Purchase Pro Dada now via Google Checkout! http://dadamailproject.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive/homepage_blog/20120104203823/ We just added a way to purchase Pro Dada using Google Checkout, instead of PayPal. We know some people don't have a PayPal account, or simply would care not to use PayPal to purchase items and we hope that this additional choice helps those in that situation. Let us know how it's working for you and please give us a little more time to complete your order, as the fullfilment of orders in Google Checkout isn't as automated as it is for PayPal <a href="http://dadamailproject.com/purchase/pro.html">Check out the Pro Dada Order Page</a>   Thanks, everyone! Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:38:00 GMT http://dadamailproject.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive/homepage_blog/20120104203823/ Code Profiling Mass Sending Speeds - Comparing v4.8.0 and v4.9.0 http://dadamailproject.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive/homepage_blog/20111206214225/ v4.9.0 of Dada Mail has some fairly awesome optimizations in the Mass Mailing parts of Dada Mail. We're going to take a minute and compare v4.8.0 and v4.9.0 of Dada Mail with a fancy code profiler which shows how much time it takes some code in Dada Mail to complete a task. In this test, we're going to test: Sending a subscription list of 500 subscribers an HTML message of around 250k Since this is just a test, the message isn't actually going to be sent out - it's just going to be saved to a text file locally (sending an actual message will have some overhead, that we're not going to measure) The profiler also adds some overhead to our data, so only look at these reports comparatively between each other and not with your own real-world findings. In the Real World, Dada Mail can probably tear through many thousands of messages/minute than what's shown in these reports. Here's the profile report for v4.8.0: <img height="589" src="http://dadamailproject.com/images/homepage_blog/nytprof-4_8_0.gif" width="782" /> I've circled the method that takes the longest in Dada Mail to complete. Unsurprisingly, it's the, mass_send, which does exactly what you think: it's sends out all the email messages for a mass mailing.   Comparing that with the same exact profile test for v4.9.0, we see a nice speedup: <img height="589" src="http://dadamailproject.com/images/homepage_blog/nytprof-4_9_0.gif" width="782" /> KABOOM! 253 seconds, instead of 924 seconds - over 3.5 times faster! So, how was this type of speedup possible? The largest hunk of code that sped up had to do with the email templating parts of Dada Mail. It wasn't altogether slow to begin with, but we did a few things to make it even faster: We're using a different templating engine in v4.9.0 called HTML::Template::Pro. This speeds up the parsing of the templates in email messages quite a bit quicker. Dada Mail doesn't come with HTML::Template::Pro, but it will use it automatically by default if available. Here's some more information. We've upgraded an include collection of CPAN modules called MIME-Tools. Old version was: 5.420 Now we're shipping with version: 5.502. Looks like the maintainers have really focused on some performance issues! We optimized our own code.  Nothing like tightening up some old code to run faster. We also found a big memory leak that affects mass mailing of HTML messages (no matter what the source is - Sending from a Webpage, right from the List Control Panel - whatever). This memory leak means that when you send out a mass mailing,  Dada Mail will continue to eat up more and more memory and never release any back. If we look at the mass mailing from v4.8.0, we'll see something like this: <img height="478" src="http://dadamailproject.com/images/homepage_blog/activity_monitor-4_8_0.gif" width="640" /> Yikes! 512 megs of RAM. What?! Fixing the memory leak, we see RAM usage go way, way, way down: <img src="../../images/homepage_blog/activity_monitor-4_9_0.gif" style="width: 640px; height: 478px;" /> That's better.   So briefly, that's a small explanation on how we optimized v4.9.0 to be faster and use less memory. If you were looking for a good reason to upgrade, here's a good one. Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:42:00 GMT http://dadamailproject.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive/homepage_blog/20111206214225/