Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!ulysses!andante!princeton!njsmu!mccc!pjh From: pjh@mccc.UUCP (Pete Holsberg) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: High Volume Calls For New Approach Message-ID: <486@mccc.UUCP> Date: 8 Dec 88 22:27:35 GMT References: <26469@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <267@ssbn.WLK.COM>Reply-To: pjh@mccc.UUCP (Pete Holsberg) Organization: The College On The Other Side of U. S. Route 1 Lines: 50 In article karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes: =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 Karl, Is there a way to measure where the breakpoint is? I have leafs running 20 MB Unix PCs and there's no way they can take a full feed. Pete -- Pete Holsberg UUCP: {...!rutgers!}princeton!mccc!pjh Mercer College CompuServe: 70240,334 1200 Old Trenton Road GEnie: PJHOLSBERG Trenton, NJ 08690 Voice: 1-609-586-4800