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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!ucbvax!fair
From: fair@ucbvax.ARPA (Erik E. Fair)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Quantitative Gloom and Doom
Message-ID: <10277@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 5-Sep-85 17:58:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.10277
Posted: Thu Sep  5 17:58:46 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 7-Sep-85 04:17:44 EDT
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 66

I hate reading predictions of gloom, doom, and ultimate disaster for
the USENET. Lauren Weinstein and Chuq Von Rospach have been doomsaying
quite a bit lately (at least, this is how I perceive their articles of
late), so I decided to get some hard numbers to refute them. I like
numbers, because, among other things, you can't argue with them.
Unfortunately, the numbers did not show what I had expected...

Disk Space Usage Summary in /usr/spool/news
on ucbvax by newsgroup (1024 byte/blocks):

International Newsgroups:
38939	net
1575	mod
791	fa
193	control
13	junk
-----
41511

National/State/Regional Newsgroups:
415	ucb
430	ba
13	uc
26	ca
54	na
---
938

Grand Total: 42449 blocks used for netnews article storage

Now an important number for context: ucbvax's netnews system keeps
articles online for 28 days (4*WEEK). Given that, we can get:

average number of blocks arriving daily: 1516	(~ 1.5 Megabytes)

number articles in the history file in net,fa,mod: 15896

subtotal of disk blocks in net,fa,mod: 41305

average number of bytes per article in net,fa,mod: 2660

average number of articles arriving daily: 567

Now some history. I did some similar counting in June 1984 on another
system (dual), and got two numbers that I thought were interesting:

		10,000 articles per month
		1600 bytes per article
therefore	16 Megabytes/month

Note: the netnews system on dual only kept netnews for two weeks,
so my sample then was smaller. However, from these numbers we get

66% increase in the average size of articles
58% increase in the number of articles per month

This, in a period of 14 months.

What can we do to save ourselves from immanent information overload?
An answer (mine, of course) will be forthcoming in a series of articles
in this newsgroup.

	keeper of the network news for ucbvax,
		and guardian of the gateway,

	Erik E. Fair	ucbvax!fair	fair@ucbarpa.BERKELEY.EDU