Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!hplabs!pyramid!epimass!jbuck
From: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Usenet volume
Keywords: volume news
Message-ID: <2707@epimass.EPI.COM>
Date: 6 Dec 88 22:51:31 GMT
References: <1995@van-bc.UUCP> <1275@vsi1.UUCP>
Reply-To: jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck)
Organization: Entropic Processing, Inc., Cupertino, CA
Lines: 51

In article <1275@vsi1.UUCP> lmb@vsi1.UUCP (Larry Blair) writes:
>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. 

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.

>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.

The state of flux that mail is in these days also contributes to the
problem; lots of users are posting messages intended for one person
because they aren't willing to take the time to figure out how to get
mail through.

>Inodes are going to become a big issue.  Many systems, like our Sun, are
>particularly stingy with creating inodes.  It appears to me that the amount
>of crossposting has increased, which, of course, uses more inodes.

Umm... there is only one inode per file.  Crossposting simply adds
more directory entries; every directory entry points to the same inode.

>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.



-- 
- Joe Buck	jbuck@epimass.epi.com, or uunet!epimass.epi.com!jbuck,
		or jbuck%epimass.epi.com@uunet.uu.net for old Arpa sites
I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long
as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.  -- G. B. Shaw