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