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From: rhorn@infinet.UUCP (Rob Horn)
Newsgroups: news.groups,news.admin
Subject: Compression adjusted news statistics
Summary: Binaries are 22% of total traffic
Message-ID: <1133@infinet.UUCP>
Date: 22 Jun 88 16:00:28 GMT
Reply-To: rhorn@infinet.UUCP (Rob Horn)
Distribution: na
Organization: Infinet, Inc.  North Andover, MA
Lines: 28


Since binaries are usually send as uuencoded, bin-hex'ed, ... files I
decided to adjust the traffic values to reflect the different
compresion efficiencies for these files.  Based on a couple dozen Mac
and PC binaries (either StuffIt'd or ARC'd) that were batched and
encoded I found an average compression of 20%.  For ordinary text, the
same batching compresses by 65%.  Since the uunet traffic numbers do not
separate binaries from others, I used Brian Reids traffic size
numbers.  The resulting traffic percentages for compressed articles
is:

Comp. (w/o binaries)     29%
Rec.                     25%
Binaries                 22%
soc.                      8
talk.                     7
misc.                     4
sci.                      3
alt.                      3

SO... when faced with traffic volume problems, eliminating binaries is
an easy step with a big impact.  We did it about two months ago when
our phone bills were becoming too large.  (We're only a backup
newsfeed for neighbors so the net will probably never notice.)-- 
				Rob  Horn
	UUCP:	...harvard!adelie!infinet!rhorn
		...ulowell!infinet!rhorn, ..decvax!infinet!rhorn
	Snail:	Infinet,  40 High St., North Andover, MA