Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site utcsstat.UUCP Path: utzoo!utcsstat!geoff From: geoff@utcsstat.UUCP (Geoff Collyer) Newsgroups: net.news,net.news.group Subject: Re: About nuking newsgroups: Message-ID: <1941@utcsstat.UUCP> Date: Sun, 27-May-84 19:47:49 EDT Article-I.D.: utcsstat.1941 Posted: Sun May 27 19:47:49 1984 Date-Received: Sun, 27-May-84 20:01:32 EDT References: <210@homxa.UUCP> Organization: U. of Toronto, Canada Lines: 44 Dave Anderson says By the way, there is NO reason we have to limit ourselves to 512 groups. Sure, its a nice round power of 2, but if we need more groups, we can certainly accomodate them. Processes are only getting bigger these days anyway. Using up additional memory to keep more groups when running checknews and readnews shouldn't scare anyone except those with systems without paging and small memories. The attitude that ``Gee my VAX has a 6 megabyte data space, so no one needs to ever think about memory constraints'' is widespread and dangerous. It is possible to fill even a 6 megabyte data space. The advantage of facing memory constraints squarely is that your programs have a good chance of running on even quite small machines. Portable programs can not assume a 6 megabyte data space. B news is not wonderfully portable, but after delinting here, 2.10.1 now runs on at least the VAX-11, IBM 370 compatible machines and the PDP-11. There are an awful lot of PDP-11s still in use (utcsstat is an 11/70, utzoo is an 11/44) and they run a wide class of programs. If news programs won't run on PDP-11s, then you have split USENET into two pieces: PDP-11 and other small virtual address space machines vs. everybody else. The PDP-11-et-al half continues to run 2.10.1 and everybody else gets the latest whizzo, spiffo version. Now all the VAX snobs in the crowd (including the Utah Usenix program committee) can argue that PDP-11s are ancient and unfashionable and we should downgrade to a VAX. However, PDP-11/44s and /70s are VAX-11/750-class CPUs and clean the toy VAXes (730, 725, etc.) utterly. Our 11s continue to serve us well, *as long as people don't make their programs gratuitously unportable*. Again, some will say that if expanding news limits breaks PDP-11s, well that's not gratuitous, it's further justification for getting a machine with a bigger virtual address space. There certainly are legitimate needs for bigger virtual address spaces and people hereabouts are looking at machines with same, but in the case of news, I think the problem is poor design. News needs a re-write. It's over-engineered, over complex, too big, too slow and it tries to be a self-contained subsystem. The essential jobs of news can be done by shell programs; a few features such as posting to multiple groups add a great deal of complexity and likely make C programs necessary to get reasonable speed.