put only allows a single message but no way to determine if mailbox is full

[bsutton]

I'm trying to use mailbox to implement a replacement for waitFor when running process.

The problem I'm encountering is that a mailbox only allows a single message at time.

Ignoring the performance concerns for a moment my immediate problem is that when I call put it throws an error saying the mailbox is full (the second time put is called). It looks like the api provides no way to determine if the mailbox is full which means I have to call put and then capture an exception which, whilst it works, really doesn't feel like the correct approach.

So in the end I guess to questions:

1. should the api have a method to determine if the mailbox is full?
2. should the mailbox allow more than a single message at a time?

Allowing multiple messages would seem to be more performant.

[bsutton]

From a performance perspective I should note that currently all I can do, after a put fails, is to make the writer sleep for an arbitrary amount of time and then try to put message into the mailbox again. This is really going to hurt performance.