Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!bellcore!texbell!ssbn!bill
From: bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: High Volume Calls For New Approach
Summary: And carry fewer groups
Keywords: Signatures;long quotes
Message-ID: <267@ssbn.WLK.COM>
Date: 7 Dec 88 16:49:30 GMT
References: <26469@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy)
Organization: W.L. Kennedy Jr. and Associates, Pipe Creek, TX
Lines: 44

In article <26469@bu-cs.BU.EDU> ptownson@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Patrick Townson) writes:
[ he said cut it down, so I did ]
>
>Thanks for thinking about it, anyway!
>
>Patrick

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.  The
upstream sites could coordinate with the sites they feed and only carry the
groups actually read downstream and locally.

My newsfeed has awarded "the most obfuscated sys line" prize but that's what
we did here.  If someone here reads the group or someone downstream wants it
then we carry it.  There seems to be little reason or justification for all
sites to carry a full feed but a lot do.  It takes some coordination and
cooperation among the admins but it results in better utilization of the
resources.

Obviously some site in each major area has to have a full feed in order to
distribute what their neighbors want.  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.  That could float all the
way up to the "newsbones", recovering bandwidth and disk space all the way
up.

Elimination of articles that should be mailed is not necessarily a good
solution.  If the text is of interest to more than just the recipient then
it's more efficient to post.  Until we can apply the techniques to mail
that we use for news (compression, batching, etc.) then posting for more
than one addressee still appears to be a win.  Speaking for only this site,
I would be glad to spend the cycles to uncompress/unbatch mail and to
recompress/rebatch pass-thru traffic in order to gain the improved utilization
of the phone lines.  If you're long distance from 99.9% of your neighbors,
ssbn is, then it doesn't make a lot of sense to run a uucico for a single
mail message unless it's the only thing in the queue.

Patrick's suggestions are good, and they will certainly help if they are
followed.  I just wanted to point out that there are site-wide opportunities
to improve utilization as well.
-- 
Bill Kennedy  usenet      {killer,att,cs.utexas.edu,sun!daver}!ssbn!bill
              internet    bill@ssbn.WLK.COM