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