Aduke.1416
net.news
utzoo!decvax!duke!trt
Wed Nov 25 14:24:30 1981
Re: ihnss.263: B netnews performance
My apologies to ihnss and other systems
that have labored under the fantastic cpu load
presented by version A (Duke) news.  However, some defense is in order:

1. The originally distributed version of Duke news,
written principally by Stephen Daniel (duke!swd),
was designed assuming there would be about one article/day.
It used general but inefficient algorithms,
but was much faster than the shell version by Steven Bellovin (unc!smb).

2. The most recent version of A news is *much* faster.
It is available as duke!~uucp/news.tar.
(You have a recent version if it has "incremental subscriptions",
so that "news -s dept !fa.arms-d" adds department news
and turns off that ARPA newsgroup, for example.)

Even Duke will probably run B news someday,
but it should not be chosen for its speed.
		Tom Truscott (duke!trt)