Autzoo.1349
gripes
utzoo!henry
Fri Feb  5 15:16:28 1982
news once more
Andy is not the only one who is annoyed and frustrated by the poor
performance of our news system and the difficulties this causes;  as
I said before (this is getting boring), our news system's performance
is admittedly unsatisfactory and I am investigating doing something about
it.  Nothing has happened yet because it's not a trivial problem.  Also
as said before, I do not know why news was still working at 1230;  I
therefore cannot do much about the specific problem.  Everybody on this
system is entitled to better service from the news system than they get,
but this is kind of academic if I don't know how to provide it yet.
For about the fifth time, I *know* it's bad, I *am* working on it,
it's *not* simple, *please* be patient.

No, this was not the first time after the silent week that we had polled
decvax, but it is a misunderstanding to think that means anything.  The
polling normally runs unattended, and usually terminates because the line
glitches and not because all waiting traffic has come over.  This is
particularly true if there is a massive pile of traffic waiting.  A study
of things like the missing-first-lines problem makes it amply clear that
much of the traffic that came over this time WAS sent during the Usenix
week.  (It is also worth noting that a peak of traffic AFTER Usenix week
is normal, because everybody goes back to work.)