Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: relaynews too slow
Message-ID: <1990Sep25.153101.2437@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Sep20.212757.12868@news.arc.nasa.gov> <1990Sep23.000826.15925@zoo.toronto.edu> <49453@olivea.atc.olivetti.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 90 15:31:01 GMT

In article <49453@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> jerry@olivey.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre) writes:
>The type of transmission used for NNTP establishes a real time
>connection...

There seems to be a general illusion that real-time connections are exempt
from considerations of efficiency.  With the volume of news we currently
see, this is not true.  Real-time or not, the most efficient way to
transfer news is to pump data bytes, in bulk, from one end to the other,
without control handshaking or other time-wasting complications interspersed.
Rev 2 of NNTP includes a batching protocol for this.

Our reaction to the way a lot of NNTP sites currently do their news
transmission is roughly:  "Jesus, are they all running on Crays?!?".
The waste of resources is mind-boggling.  We wish we could afford to
squander so many cycles on ruinously inefficient transmission methods;
it would make life a lot easier.

>The performace advantage of C news seems to rest primarily on a
>deliberate delaying of the processing and retransmission of news
>articles.  This is at odds with the goal of many NNTP developers who
>wanted to reduce the propagation delay of articles...

I confess that we fail to understand why some of the NNTP folks are so
obsessed with propagating talk.religion in seconds rather than minutes.
However, this need not imply a contradiction with C News's philosophy
of processing in bulk for efficiency.  You just have to do things more
cleverly to combine the two.  Work is in progress on this.
-- 
TCP/IP: handling tomorrow's loads today| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
OSI: handling yesterday's loads someday|  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry