Newsgroups: news.software.b Path: utzoo!utstat!geoff From: geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) Subject: Re: NNTP vs Cnews (was: Re: Cnews is not for me) Message-ID: <1989Aug13.063336.17038@utstat.uucp> Organization: Statistics, U. of Toronto References: <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP> <1989Aug12.221624.12153@utstat.uucp> <1894@ucsd.EDU> Distribution: usa Date: Sun, 13 Aug 89 06:33:36 GMT Brian Kantor: >Geoff's model of the interface between CNews and NNTP is correct >if you have only one NNTP feed Note that the C news NNTP mods were written for jarvis.csri.toronto.edu which gets at least two NNTP feeds from off-campus (from mailrus and rutgers). The news administrators there (and I'm told at U. of Montreal) refused to run NNTP if it insisted on running an rnews for every incoming article, which is exactly analogous to the performance disaster of B news unbatching. Running an inews per article would be even worse. >If we were to batch those articles and then process them periodically, >we would have wasted significant amounts of network resources transferring >duplicate articles. You can override a few default settings (*without* changing any C code!) in server/batch.c to process batches every so-many seconds or every so-many bytes in order to achieve as small a window for duplicates as you wish; it's your CPU and your disk. The important thing is to not repeat the mistakes of B news unbatching by spawning an rnews for every incoming article. A further improvement would be to restrict the number of simultaneous nntp daemons to some locally-chosen number. The CSRI folk have occasionally expressed a desire for this. >Cnews is a good thing. But it has one or two assumptions that >don't fit the environment in which some of us live. Thanks, we like to think that we have provided tools so that people can do just this. People have described to us some really inventive ways in which they have combined our programs (e.g. running expire only from newsrun when free space gets low), so by one measure ("a tool is a program that people use in ways never imagined by its authors" - Brian Kernighan?), we are providing tools. >And remember that Cnews was developed at a site that was (so I'm told) >primarily uucp-connected at the time that the design and major development >was done. In fact we put a lot of late development work into hooks for NNTP, so this isn't really relevant any more. >Besides, you can steal some of the really good ideas from Cnews and >retrofit them into Bnews if you want Now this I've *got* to see. The reason I wrote relaynews was because B rnews was such a ball of hair that I couldn't get it to unbatch without invoking a process per article. There are global variables all over B news and lots of places think it's okay to just print an error message and exit when anything goes wrong; this doesn't cut it for unbatching. > "UUCP is dead." - Peter Honeyman, Feb 1989. I asked Peter a few months ago if he really said that, and his reply was essentially `yes, but I should have said "mailer science is dead"'. Certainly our uucp connection to citi over the Internet works just fine. -- Geoff Collyer utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu