Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site watcgl.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!watcgl!dmmartindale
From: dmmartindale@watcgl.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Wanted: news batching with compression
Message-ID: <2299@watcgl.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 24-Mar-84 13:59:24 EST
Article-I.D.: watcgl.2299
Posted: Sat Mar 24 13:59:24 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 25-Mar-84 13:14:57 EST
References: <955@qubix.UUCP>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 17

My comments about rnews overhead being insignificant compared to uux
were directed at sites which don't use batching, since the original article
seemed to imply that this was the case for them.  Our experience has been
that using the 'U' option of the sys file does save a bit on overhead
compared to 'B' since the news spool file isn't copied, and saves a lot
on spool filesystem space since you don't have all those duplicate
copies of the news sitting around until they are sent to the destination
machine.  But doing one uux per article is still horribly inefficient
since uux accesses several files and creates several new ones every time
it starts up.  Batching reduces the time required for processing the
rnews's drastically (utzoo!henry claims something like 1/10 and that
seems reasonable to me), and the added overhead of running the batcher
(and uux) once for each site every half hour or hour seems to be
insignificant.

In other words, I greatly recommend batching, even with the rather
simplistic unbatcher that was supplied with the news system.