Xref: utzoo news.software.b:1457 news.software.nntp:47 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!pasteur!ucbarpa.Berkeley.EDU!fair 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> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.Edu Organization: USENET Protocol Police, Western Gateway Division Lines: 18 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