Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cbmvax!grr
From: grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: to PEP or not to PEP?
Message-ID: <7642@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 12 Aug 89 19:33:35 GMT
References: <1989Aug10.175458.20369@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins)
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 36

In article <1989Aug10.175458.20369@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> I recently sent the following to our Trailblazer-equipped neighbors, and
> dialup congestion is now noticeably less common here.  It occurred to me
> that others might be interested as well:
> ...
> I would suggest that unless there are factors I'm not aware of, it is in
> everyone's best interests, including yours, if you do *not* fall back to
> slow speeds when you can't get through to utzoo at high speed.

Yes, I've done something similar here.  Initially, I had fallbacks for
all the PEP numbers, but busy conditions on either end resulted in calls
gettings started on the fallback lines, so that large amounts of transfers
will still taking place at 2400 baud.

The downside to yanking the fall backs is that often it seems that the
other guys 8-) trailblazer(s) will occasisionally wedge and be offline
for a day or longer or simply be unreliable.  Ideally you want some kind
of adaptived fallback where after a day or so it breaks down and tries
the 2400 baud numbers.  The compromise is the keep all the cruft in the
sys file and uncomment it when things get bad.

I've also worked with my neighbors to jack up news batch sizes from around
50K (before compression) to 500K.  This seems to be a little bit more
efficient - 2 or 3 files per call per feed, than  flood of the little ones.
Surprisingly, no problems have shown up, but I'd hate to have to fallback
to 1200 baud with a backlog of those suckers.

It begins to seem like it would be nice if there was a widely distributed
batch mail protocol - most of the little, high overhead transfers are now
mail, often 13 messages forwarded to the same person from some non-digested
mailing list.

-- 
George Robbins - now working for,	uucp: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr
but no way officially representing	arpa: cbmvax!grr@uunet.uu.net
Commodore, Engineering Department	fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)