Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Speed tradeoffs in C-news?
Message-ID: <1991Jun28.171144.7015@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 1991 17:11:44 GMT
References: <1991Jun28.105916.806@panix.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <1991Jun28.105916.806@panix.uucp> alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen) writes:
>What takes more time, for a large feed (~20MB/day)?
>1) Process 2-3 MB of junk articles per day
>2) Change the "ME" sys file line to trash these hierarchies. We'd basically
>   have to add about a dozen "!hierarchy," to the groups field.

I'd be very surprised if (2) wasn't substantially cheaper.  The newsgroup-
matching code that does those comparisons got a lot of attention and is
quite fast.  Doing filesystem operations (e.g. to file articles) is costly,
especially the filename lookups (yes, even on systems with namei caches).
-- 
Lightweight protocols?  TCP/IP *is*     | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
lightweight already; just look at OSI.  |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry