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From: francis@arthur.uchicago.edu (Francis Stracke)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Cooperating on Sys7 distribution
Summary: Let's give apple.com a break
Message-ID: <FRANCIS.91May10000430@arthur.uchicago.edu>
Date: 10 May 91 06:04:30 GMT
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (NewsMistress)
Distribution: comp
Organization: Mathematics Department, University of Chicago
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Somebody just wrote to me, "Guess what I'm going to be doing Monday
night? Boy, apple.com is going to be one busy machine."

Let's stop and think about this.  news.lists estimates 43,000 people
reading this group, 64,000 reading comp.sys.mac.misc.  (And, strangely
enough, 28,000 reading comp.sys.mac.) Say 5% of those 64K decide to
FTP System 7.  That'll be 3,000+ file transfers from that poor machine,
at about 5.6M per, a total of 16.8G.

Look at bandwidth considerations.  The fastest FTP transfer I've ever
seen (between here and some place in Wisconsin) was something like
50K/sec (I know there're probably some faster, but very rare).  Say
the average is about 20K/sec (probably actually a bit less).  Not
considering *any* CPU difficulties with doing many, many transfers at
once, that's something on the order of a megasecond to do all these
transfers from apple.com.  A megasecond is over 10 days.  This is a
*major* problem.  (For the moment, I'm not even considering the netlag
& other factors that'll slow things down even more.)

What can we do here? Obvious thing is *wait a while*.  Maybe get it
from dealers (the bandwidth of physically distributed disks is pretty
high--consider a station wagon full of HD disks).  If you can't or
don't want to deal with that, wait a few days before FTPing.  And go
in with friends: download it once, and copy the disks.  (Or even
download to one machine, then transfer it by email--your local
resources won't be getting clobbered like Apple's.)

Now, I'm not so naive as to think people will cooperate enough to make
this work.  Of course not.  (Even if they did, it'd be pretty silly
for *everybody* to wait.  What if everybody waited exactly three days?
:-) We need to share the burden.  Can we (with Apple's consent, of
course) get other FTP sites set up to distribute Sys7? Will sumex &
rascal have it in their mirrors? Will some other sites donate some
resources here? (I hate asking for stuff like this when I can't give
it myself--I would if I were a sysadmin.  :-) If Apple won't consent
to redistributing like this, maybe they could set up a mail-based
server, which could queue the requests and fill them much more slowly
than FTP does, thus letting them stretch out the strain on their
resources.

Any other suggestions? Anybody willing to play host?

--
/============================================================================\
| Francis Stracke	       | My opinions are my own.  I don't steal them.|
| Department of Mathematics    |=============================================|
| University of Chicago	       | Earth: Love it or leave it.	     	     |
| francis@zaphod.uchicago.edu  |  					     |
\============================================================================/