Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!ucsd!brian
From: brian@ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: NNTP vs Cnews (was: Re: Cnews is not for me)
Message-ID: <1897@ucsd.EDU>
Date: 13 Aug 89 19:01:16 GMT
References: <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP> <1989Aug12.221624.12153@utstat.uucp> <1894@ucsd.EDU> <1895@ucsd.EDU> 
Reply-To: brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor)
Distribution: usa
Organization: The Avant-Garde of the Now, Ltd.
Lines: 26

Felix Lee mentions 36 duplicates out of one day's 1800 articles.
Clearly that's an acceptable number.

Last Friday we received about 3500 articles; about 350 were duplicates.
Some of that is due to the fact that we have a couple of uucp newsfeeds,
thus I don't know how many of the 350 were nntp only duplicates.

Loose thought:

NNTP could insert received message-ids into a temporary cache that
it would use to reject duplicate offerings as well as checking the
history file.  The cache entry would be purged after a day.  Then
you can batch the articles themselves.  In fact, the easy way to
do this in the B-news environment is to write a simple stupid little
'nntprnews' that just stuffs the article into /usr/spool/news/.rnews
and stores the message-id into a DBM database, along with the
timedate as an ASCII long.  Doing it this way makes purging
(nntpexpire?) the temporary database real simple, and allows you
to batch the actual posting.  Or instead of 'nntprnews', just make
it a new subroutine in nntpd - it's small and simple enough....
I haven't tried it - hell, I just thought it up while writing this
followup.

This would probably work real well with Cnews too.  

	- Brian