Re:AIM will shut down after 20 years
by pwg on Friday October 06, 2017 @05:42PM
(#15420697)
> It's very surprising to me that person-to-person text communication is divided into two completely different and incompatible types of service: short latency (~20 sec, "email") and very short latency (~1 sec, "instant messaging").
Email, for network connected machines with delivery direct into the recipients inbox (this is how SMTP works if both sides are network connected and online, and in fact was how SMTP was designed to work for connected systems) is also sub 1 sec delivery latency (at least for normal sized emails, 2G of attached photos will take a moment to ship over).
20 seconds for delivery of email (ignoring intermittently disconnected systems, which email still supports) is only because most email clients work in a polling pull mode from a central server, and the polling delay in the client is what adds the apparent latency. It is a result of how most clients are designed, not an inherent built in latency of the system.
Email, for network connected machines with delivery direct into the recipients inbox (this is how SMTP works if both sides are network connected and online, and in fact was how SMTP was designed to work for connected systems) is also sub 1 sec delivery latency (at least for normal sized emails, 2G of attached photos will take a moment to ship over).
20 seconds for delivery of email (ignoring intermittently disconnected systems, which email still supports) is only because most email clients work in a polling pull mode from a central server, and the polling delay in the client is what adds the apparent latency. It is a result of how most clients are designed, not an inherent built in latency of the system.