> The poll timeout is 3ms, as specified by the lore. I think this is nonsense, why would an invalid or incomplete sendmail configuration default to three milliseconds?
The answer is that per the original story, it was not defaulting to three milliseconds. It was defaulting to 0, and the 3ms was just how long it took the system to check for a response with a 0 timeout:
> Some experimentation established that on this particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.
This is a very different scenario, as it's not clear there should be a poll() there at all (or more likely select() given the age of the story) to match the original, but if there was, the select would have a timeout of 0, not 3ms, and would just happen to be unable to distinguish between 0 and up to 3ms.
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