Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!hplabs!pyramid!vsi1!lmb
From: lmb@vsi1.UUCP (Larry Blair)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Usenet volume
Keywords: volume news
Message-ID: <1278@vsi1.UUCP>
Date: 6 Dec 88 21:07:58 GMT
References: <1995@van-bc.UUCP>
Reply-To: lmb@vsi1.UUCP (Larry Blair)
Organization: VICOM Systems Inc., San Jose, CA
Lines: 45

In article <1995@van-bc.UUCP> sl@van-bc.UUCP (pri=-10 Stuart Lynne) writes:
=I was talking to a new news administrator today about the current news
=volumes and rate of increase.
=
=My gut feeling was that the news volume is doubling about every 16 months.
=
=Anybody have any statistics they can work with to give us an accurate idea
=of the rate of increase of volume. 

Many sites in the Bay Area running weekly statistics.  Last January, the
average number of posting weekly were in the 7000-8000 range.  With the
exception of Tahnksgiving week, the last few weeks have all been over 16,000.
Last week saw > 17,000.  I ran partial statistics last week, as my inodes
rapidly dwindled, and found that we received over 13,000 postings from 9am
Tuesday through 4pm Thursday.

This presents a few problems:

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.

Large sites that are feed 20 or 30 other sites will have no choice but
to cut back.

As the number of postings grows, it becomes more and more difficult to
follow discussion lines.  One posting will quickly draw 50 responses.
Next year, it will be 100.

Inodes are going to become a big issue.  Many systems, like our Sun, are
particularly stingy with creating inodes.

I had an interesting conversation with a new site the other day.  We were
going to give him a full feed.  I started asking questions.  How much disk
space to you have allocated for news?  "55 MB."  Err... you may survive
for a little while with short cycle expires.  How many inodes are free?
"Oh, I've got tons.  18,000."  Better shorten that cycle some more.  Btw,
how much free space in the filesystem with /usr/spool/uucp?  "1.8 MB."
Uh oh, we'll have to play it by ear.

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.
-- 
Larry Blair   ames!vsi1!lmb   lmb%vsi1.uucp@ames.arc.nasa.gov