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From: fair@ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU (Erik E. Fair)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.software.nntp
Subject: Reading news: NNTP v.s. NFS for access to the database
Message-ID: <4246@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu>
Date: 4 Jul 88 01:54:41 GMT
References: <16342@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
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In the referenced article, bob@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) writes:
	A secondary reason why I personally prefer to use NFS to
	read news is because it's actually faster than using the
	NNTP protocol.  I have run a "local" rn and a NNTP rrn
	side-by-side and rn comes up observably better in user
	responsiveness and feel.

Bob, can you quantify this? In particular, I'd like to know where
NNTP is taking the hit in performance. Context switching? I'd be
surprised if you found that NNTP had significantly higher overhead
than NFS for this application. Is it just that almost all the netnews
readers in existence were written (read "optimized") for having
filesystem access, rather than for network access (and NFS hides the
details better?)?

	anyone else got hard numbers?

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.berkeley.edu