Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!stl!robobar!ronald From: ronald@robobar.co.uk (Ronald S H Khoo) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: Painful interactive posting response from C news Message-ID: <1991Mar14.092311.20751@robobar.co.uk> Date: 14 Mar 91 09:23:11 GMT References: <1991Mar11.181643.29880@zoo.toronto.edu> Organization: Robobar Ltd., Perivale, Middx., ENGLAND. Lines: 26 henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: > There's a problem in that the posting strategy basically assumes that the > relaynews lock has a low duty cycle, which is not always true on hard- > working NNTP systems. It's not just hardworking NNTP systems that have high duty-cycle relaynews locks either. UUCP sites in countries with seriously expensive telephone charges (no flatrate or free local calls in the UK [except maybe Hull?]) have problems too. I saw relaynews locked solid for ages last night. And posting isn't the only place where the low duty cycle is assumed either. There's a real problem that sendbatches is totally locked out during one single newsrun that lasts for hours. This means that valuable trailblazer time is wasted between finishing the 6pm call collecting the news from the backbone and newsrun to finish processing it, before the stuff for downstream sites get queued. In fact, I'm thinking of kludgeing it so that newsrun keeps a count of how many batches its done, and after a limit, sleeping for a few minutes to let sendbatches in (retaining LOCKinput, of course) then exiting or continuing. Basically, just forcibly lower the duty cycle. Henry, is this unreasonable, or have you got a better idea ? -- Ronald Khoo +44 81 991 1142 (O) +44 71 229 7741 (H)