Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!olivea!olivey!jerry
From: jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: B-news inews patch to Message-ID line
Message-ID: <49311@olivea.atc.olivetti.com>
Date: 29 Aug 90 19:31:34 GMT
References: <651649817.25609@quack.sac.ca.us> <1990Aug26.181014.26880@looking.on.ca>
Sender: news@olivea.atc.olivetti.com
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, CA
Lines: 22

In article <1990Aug26.181014.26880@looking.on.ca> brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) writes:
>All I can say is, "huh?"   The change to really long message ids in C
>inews was one of the things people complain about, not something people
>liked.
>
>You save one file open/read/write on the sequence file, but you add 10
>bytes per message + 10 bytes/reference, or about 50,000 bytes/day on
>5,000 machines, or 250 megabytes/day spread around.  (If everybody did it.)

And to state what some non-news gurus may not be aware of, the
message-id is only generated for local postings, not for articles coming
in from other sites.  A site is going to envoke this code from a few to
a few hundred times a day.  A drop in the bucket compared to the
overhead of relaying all those extra long message ids around on every
system.  The overhead is compounded when the longer message-ids are
incorporated in refference lines.

There are some legitimate reasons for not using a sequence file.
One is to avoid the need for locking it during updates.  But if the
price is to triple or quadruple their length then it is too high.

				Jerry Aguirre