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From: phil@amdcad.UUCP (Phil Ngai)
Newsgroups: net.news.adm,net.news.b
Subject: Re: curious 2.10.3 efficiency situation
Message-ID: <10428@amdcad.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 8-Mar-86 15:39:33 EST
Article-I.D.: amdcad.10428
Posted: Sat Mar  8 15:39:33 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Mar-86 07:58:52 EST
References: <5044@glacier.ARPA> <5104@glacier.ARPA>
Reply-To: phil@amdcad.UUCP (Phil Ngai)
Organization: AMD, Sunnyvale, California
Lines: 31
Xref: watmath net.news.adm:548 net.news.b:1308

Brian, your analysis sounds quite intriguing at first but I can't seem
to make the numbers really work out. To start with, you say a normal
day's load of news takes 3 hours to process. While you are down or
trying to catch up, your feeds send you everything and since you have
two feeds, I would expect your load of news to double from 500 to 1000
articles per day. This is only 6 hours of news in the worse case, so
you should be able to make considerable progress in the other 18 hours
catching up.

If you were down for a week, you'd have to spend 7 * 6 or 42 hours to
catch up. During that time, you'd get shipped another 12 hours of news
and while processing that 12 hours you get 3 hours, etc. Although the
spike takes a while to dampen out, it should indeed do so.

There is another factor. Looking through my logs, I see that my 780
processes 5 articles/min but rejects 19 articles/min. While you are
catching up you should be rejecting 50% of your articles and if a 750
behaves similarly, a day's worth of news ought to take 3 (normal
processing) + 3/4 (reject four times as fast) hours.

I haven't considered modem time here, it too is subject to a latch-up
effect under the right conditions. We have four dialers, so we
probably don't have to worry.
-- 
 "We must welcome the future, remembering that soon it will become the
  present, and respect the past, knowing that once it was all that was
  humanly possible."

 Phil Ngai +1 408 749 5720
 UUCP: {ucbvax,decwrl,ihnp4,allegra}!amdcad!phil
 ARPA: amdcad!phil@decwrl.dec.com