[Standards-JIG] stanza delivery ordering

[Nolan Eakins]

Chris Mullins wrote:

>If I send you a message, and PSA a message, my server will first send
>out the message to you, and once that's done send out the message to
>PSA.
>  
>
The RFC doesn't mandate that. What's mandated is the order of stanzas 
between two JIDs. As an example, we have Alice, Bob, and myself. We 
could be on the same or seperate servers. I don't think it matters much 
in this debate. Each sends me three messages, in which each pair of 
messages is sent at the same time. The activity looks like:

Alice1      Bob1
Alice2      Bob2
Alice3      Bob3

Below are some possible, valid orders in which I may receive their 
messages over my connection:

Alice1, Alice2, Alice3, Bob1, Bob2, Bob3
Alice1, Bob1, Alice2, Bob2, Alice3, Bob3
Bob1, Alice1, Alice2, Bob2, Bob3, Alice3

Presumably, server implementors are a lazy bunch and just send stanzas 
out over a connection in the order that they are received. Although in a 
highly concurrent server, Alice2 may take a lot longer to process than 
Bob2. The RFC was written with this in mind allowing Bob2 and Bob3 to 
bypass Alice2 and Alice3, but Alice2 MUST always proceed Alice3 even if 
Alice2 took 10 minutes to process.

If you'd like a list like the above, you'd have something like: Bob1, 
Alice1, Bob2, Bob3, Alice2, Alice3

That's my understanding anyway, and in the context of IM this makes the 
most sense. Sorry if I repeated what someone else has said.

Enjoy,
Nolan