Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu!karl
From: karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: High Volume Calls For New Approach
Message-ID: 
Date: 7 Dec 88 20:33:23 GMT
References: <26469@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <267@ssbn.WLK.COM>
Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu
Organization: OSU
Lines: 36
In-reply-to: bill@ssbn.WLK.COM's message of 7 Dec 88 16:49:30 GMT

bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy) writes:
   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...

   My newsfeed has awarded "the most obfuscated sys line" prize...

   ...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.

While I think the idea is very good, in practice it causes other
problems of its own.  Notable, from my perspective, is the trouble
caused by rnews spending lots of time parsing the sys file.  Our
limited resource is mostly CPU (and phone lines; 10 isn't enough for
the number of news neighbors and anon uucp'ers we've got), and I get
really nervous when I see osu-cis unbatching simultaneously from all
of att, killer, and tut.cis.ohio-state.edu, all while news is being
rebatched with compression to the leaf sites, because the CPU is being
flogged into the ground - load, as measured from a utility similar to
BSD's `uptime,' shows numbers in the vicinity of 11-14 in such cases.
Rnews takes over the system.

We actually had to request that one particular site, which had an
extremely convoluted sys line on osu-cis, to move on and take a feed
elsewhere around town; his sys line was huge, but contained exactly
the set of groups he wanted.  The tradeoff was not acceptable.  The
removal of that one site (18 others remain) was enough to leave the
system responding acceptably.  Reducing the amount of news sent didn't
increase the ability of my system to feed news.

It's more efficient for massfeed sites to have all downstream feeds be
relatively simple in terms of distribution, as opposed to worrying
about the Mbyte volume going over the lines.

--Karl