Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!agate!apple!bbn!husc6!ogccse!littlei!donk!pmb
From: pmb@donk.UUCP (pmb)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Daily news volume disagrees w/uunet stats
Message-ID: <341@donk.UUCP>
Date: 11 Jul 89 15:51:37 GMT
References: <123@uucs1.UUCP> <1989Jul10.223958.28264@fxgrp.fx.com>
Reply-To: pmb@.UUCP (Patti Beadles)
Organization: DTE, Intel Corporation; Hillsboro, OR
Lines: 11

In article <1989Jul10.223958.28264@fxgrp.fx.com> grady@fxgrp.fx.com (Steven Grady) writes:
>I watched the output of du, and almost uniformly each top-level
>directory (comp, rec, sci, soc, talk, etc) had about 3/4 the amount
>of news that uunet had, for half as much time.  This comes out to
>50% more space than expected from uunet's lists.

This is speculation, but uunet may well be measuring the volume of news by
actually counting bytes, and not by doing a du.  (Du counts disk blocks; a
block with one byte on it will be counted exactly the same as one that's
full.  And since most blocks aren't full, this number will always be higher
than the true amount of news that's there.)