Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: High Volume Calls For New Approach Message-ID:Date: 7 Dec 88 20:33:23 GMT References: <26469@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <267@ssbn.WLK.COM> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: OSU Lines: 36 In-reply-to: bill@ssbn.WLK.COM's message of 7 Dec 88 16:49:30 GMT bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) writes: There's another thing that would help a lot. If the leaves only take groups that people actually read then that amount of traffic is eliminated... My newsfeed has awarded "the most obfuscated sys line" prize... ...If we started at the leaves (ssbn is really a leaf even though we feed a couple of sites) and made up the "obfuscated sys line" and sent it up, then our feeds could consolidate them and cut out the groups they don't need to carry. While I think the idea is very good, in practice it causes other problems of its own. Notable, from my perspective, is the trouble caused by rnews spending lots of time parsing the sys file. Our limited resource is mostly CPU (and phone lines; 10 isn't enough for the number of news neighbors and anon uucp'ers we've got), and I get really nervous when I see osu-cis unbatching simultaneously from all of att, killer, and tut.cis.ohio-state.edu, all while news is being rebatched with compression to the leaf sites, because the CPU is being flogged into the ground - load, as measured from a utility similar to BSD's `uptime,' shows numbers in the vicinity of 11-14 in such cases. Rnews takes over the system. We actually had to request that one particular site, which had an extremely convoluted sys line on osu-cis, to move on and take a feed elsewhere around town; his sys line was huge, but contained exactly the set of groups he wanted. The tradeoff was not acceptable. The removal of that one site (18 others remain) was enough to leave the system responding acceptably. Reducing the amount of news sent didn't increase the ability of my system to feed news. It's more efficient for massfeed sites to have all downstream feeds be relatively simple in terms of distribution, as opposed to worrying about the Mbyte volume going over the lines. --Karl