Newsgroups: news.software.b Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: NNTP vs Cnews (was: Re: Cnews is not for me) Message-ID: <1989Aug13.071802.5187@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <2828@ndsuvax.UUCP> <1989Aug12.221624.12153@utstat.uucp> <1894@ucsd.EDU> Date: Sun, 13 Aug 89 07:18:02 GMT In article <1894@ucsd.EDU> brian@ucsd.edu (Brian Kantor) writes: >... we each have multiple NNTP news feeds which >are CONTINUOUSLY delivering news articles. If we were to batch >those articles and then process them periodically, we would have >wasted significant amounts of network resources transferring >duplicate articles. (BTW, our goal is to thus cut the average news >propagation delay from hours to minutes, if not seconds.) There is a fundamental tradeoff here which simply can't be escaped: efficient processing of large amounts of news requires amortizing setup overhead over more than one article, while lightning-fast propagation requires processing each article as it arrives. You just have to decide where the balance point lies for you. With volume in the multiple MB, many of us have no trouble deciding that we don't *care* whether news gets through in hours or minutes. We certainly don't care enough to dedicate an increasingly large fraction of an already-busy system... which is what it takes if you really want to cut response time. If you have good-sized machines to spare, we'd be happy to pay the shipping to have them sent up here, where they will be used for real work instead. :-) -- V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu