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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhuxl!ulysses!smb
From: smb@ulysses.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.news.adm
Subject: Re: how batch & unbatch work
Message-ID: <671@ulysses.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 26-Oct-83 18:52:11 EDT
Article-I.D.: ulysses.671
Posted: Wed Oct 26 18:52:11 1983
Date-Received: Thu, 27-Oct-83 20:27:05 EDT
References: <224@clyde.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 16

One addition to the excellent article on batching netnews:  don't use
batch intervals of more than an hour or so, even if you're not a backbone
site.  30 minutes is probably better for most sites.  The problem is
that the longer the batch interval, the larger the uucp file -- and
files over 200K tend to break uucp too often.  Besides, it's more to
retransmit if a link dies in the middle.  What I'd really like is a batcher
that's length-limited; i.e., one that sends off a batch when 50K bytes
or so has accumulated.  You're still getting most of the performance
advantage, but with fewer problems.  (Another problem for many sites:  if
too large a batch comes in, the LCK.XQT file can time out while all the
news submissins are taking place.  This isn't hypothetical; it used to
happen to us before we got a better uucp installed.  Using output batching
also helps prevent this, incidentally -- running a separate uux for each
article is *very* expensive, and can increase the load on a system by a
large amount.  Installing batching can tremdously reduce the load netnews
puts on a system.)