Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Is C-News reliable?  Its certainly faster...
Message-ID: <1991Jan27.045100.26152@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1991Jan24.014403.1255@coplex.uucp>
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 1991 04:51:00 GMT

In article <1991Jan24.014403.1255@coplex.uucp> dean@coplex.uucp (Dean Brooks) writes:
>   However, I am curious, do people generally regard C-News (as of the
>Dec-15th patch) as being completely reliable for news transmission?

Geoff and I do not qualify as exactly unbiased :-), but reliability is
probably our #1 concern.  C News work is not, to any great extent, what
we get paid for.  News failures almost by definition interrupt work
normally considered more important.  The biggest concern for most any
such software on our systems is that it run smoothly and not bother us.

C News was designed to behave itself unattended.  Admittedly, our
experience is not necessarily typical because we're really used to the
software... but our experience is that, with the single caveat that you 
must not be too desperately short on disk space, it does behave.  We
have had fan mail from others to this effect -- e.g. "needs much less
handholding than B News" -- but it is hard to assess how representative
it is.  With well over 1000 sites running C News, however, any major
reliability problems should be inundating our mailbox with complaints.
That has not happened.  Startup problems happen, but the rare cases of
sustained difficulties seem to be local problems like strange systems.

C News does try to react well to space shortages, but its safety margins
can't be trimmed to zero, and if things get too tight it will end up
backed into a corner where it can't *do* anything for fear of overflow.
Utzoo ran with a modest disk shortage for some time, and C News coped
in day-to-day operations, but it was a constant nuisance making sure
that enough space to break any logjams did eventually become available.
-- 
If the Space Shuttle was the answer,   | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
what was the question?                 |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry