Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!mailrus!ncar!ames!killer!rpp386!jfh From: jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US (The Beach Bum) Newsgroups: news.admin Subject: Re: Usenet volume Message-ID: <9212@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US> Date: 8 Dec 88 05:05:15 GMT References: <1995@van-bc.UUCP> <1275@vsi1.UUCP> <2707@epimass.EPI.COM> Reply-To: jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US (The Beach Bum) Organization: Big "D" Home for Wayward Hackers Lines: 80 In article <2707@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes: >Fortunately, average article size has been steadily decreasing as the >numbers have been growing (we are experiencing exponential growth, but >the exponent is smaller than article numbers would indicate). In the >Old Days, people treated Usenet articles as a published medium. Now >people just chat, posting lots of messages with no more than five or >six lines of original text. There seem to be groups where this is true, and others which do not experience this phenomenon. Aside from periodic Henry-worship, Unix-Wizards is a good example. The worst problem facing USENET, IMHO, is the repeat business. The periodic posting of the same thread. Perhaps it is time to expand news.announce.newusers into every such newsgroup. Regular monthly introductory postings with the commonly asked questions for that group. >>It is almost impossible to take a full feed at 1200 baud. A particularly >>heavy day can take over 24 hours to receive. At this rate, 2400 won't work >>by 1990. > >Some have said that the technological innovations (compress, 2400 baud >modems, Trailblazers, NNTP) have allowed us to cope with the growth. >Unfortunately, it seems to me that they have been a big contribution >to causing the growth. Agreed. I would like to add that uunet, portal and PC Pursuit are also contributors to the problem. USENET is not as ``elite'' as it once was. In all fairness, sites such as mine are also to blame - I feed 10 partials. Who knows what those sites do. >>I expect that there will be 50 responses to this posting, many with >>statements like, "I run with 20MB and 5,000 inodes." Of course it is >>possible, but not with standard software and default expires. > >Count off: one.... I have 50 Mb and 30K inodes, and do three expire >runs -- groups are kept for 6, 4, or 2 days depending on arbitrary >criteria that only I understand :-). We run standard news 2.11.14B. >I doubt if most folks carry stuff for two-three weeks anymore. It's >not terribly useful to keep that much anyway. Well, having professed my guilt earlier ... I run 2.11.8 in 24MB. I take alt, comp, misc, news, rec, sci, unix-pc, pubnet, bionet, tx and dfw. And then redistribute and expire it all. Immediate expires for things I don't use, four days for everything else. Get it in, unbatch, batch, and then expire. Most of my sys lines are fairly convoluted, here is an example: [ notice the One True Indenting Style ;-) ] void:world,na,usa,tx,dfw,\ alt,\ comp.databases,comp.lang.c,comp.laser,\ comp.mail.uucp,\ comp.sources,\ !comp.sources.x,!comp.sources.atari.st,\ comp.sources.misc,comp.sys.tandy,\ comp.terminals,comp.unix,\ rec.arts.startrek,rec.food,rec.humor,rec.humor.funny,\ to.void:F: I don't understand what Karl [ at osu-cis ] is having trouble with. Unless I missed something [ which is possible, I just don't see what is so horrible about 18 convoluted sys lines ] My attitude is just to get the feed I take in, and then let rnews chew on the articles, and spit them back out. I would like to get out of the news business to such an extent, but as volume goes up, sites are less willing to add feeds. And then someone calls asking for a partial, and so on. Two things need to be encouraged - more sites willing to shoulder more of the load, i.e., fewer leafs per branch; and more moderation. The former will make it easier to get on the net, the later will make it more worthwhile. -- John F. Haugh II +-Cat of the Week:--------------_ /|- VoiceNet: (214) 250-3311 Data: -6272 |Aren't you absolutely sick and \'o.O' InterNet: jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US |tired of looking at these damn =(___)= UucpNet :!killer!rpp386!jfh +things in everybody's .sig?-------U---