Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C News sort -u | batcher ?
Message-ID: <1990Sep26.193235.10920@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Sep25.233128.10037@robobar.co.uk>
Date: Wed, 26 Sep 90 19:32:35 GMT

In article <1990Sep25.233128.10037@robobar.co.uk> ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) writes:
>I forgot about all this until I (finally :-) got round to reading the
>C News paper this afternoon and realised, of course, that batcher does
>actually gain from having sorted input.  You might not recover all of
>the cost of doing the sort, but you certainly get some of it back.

There are, unfortunately, some other costs which are harder to quantify.
In particular, sorting can result in out-of-order delivery of articles,
when cross-postings are involved.  Granted, out-of-order delivery exists
already, but I'm unhappy about the thought of knowingly making it worse.
This is why the standard C News batcher doesn't sort.

>I thouroughly recommend the C news paper to any C News admin.  It was an
>excellent read.  Perhaps there should be a louder pointer to it in the C
>News distribution ? I couldn't find one there at all!

A good point, although we'd have to include some details on obtaining it,
since most libraries don't carry the Usenix proceedings.
-- 
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