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
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