Mailinator Architecture... Great article...

Read a great article today about the architecture of mailinator. Very interesting reading. Paul Tyma's end product really lines up with my own core values:

• To be ultra-efficient, where necessary, build it yourself.
  
• Code for software survival.
  
• Understand how your software is used to make things more efficient (ex: Mailinator compresses all inbound emails - 99% are never read, compress once, decompression is rare and cheap, and memory is finite).
  

We run hosted FIT servers on behalf of our customers and some of them have been running continuously with no restarts for over 200 days. This kind of robustness comes at the architecture level - creating a design that ensures memory is used efficiently, testing for memory leaks, and that a framework that attempts to continue running regardless of the conditions thrown at it. Expect the worst, and persevere through it. Great reading...