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