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From: chapman@miro.berkeley.edu (Brent Chapman)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Statistics, polls: honest, no flames
Message-ID: <12727@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: Thu, 27-Mar-86 22:52:22 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.12727
Posted: Thu Mar 27 22:52:22 1986
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In article <1960@saber.UUCP> msc@saber.UUCP (Mark Callow) writes:
>> net to report in.  For example, there have only been a few entries
>> from AT&T -- and none from any of the major sites (ihnp4, cbosgd,
>
>This is the second posting implying that the data from the "major" sites
>is important to this readership survey and must be gathered before any
>decisions are made.  Why?
>
>The volume of traffic that passes through a site is totally irrelevant
>to a survey of newsgroup readership.  The important criteria is the number
>of users particularly news readers on the machine.  Some of the most "major"
>sites are simply mail and news store and forward machines. (e.g. decvax and
>ucbvax)  As such they probably don't have any users let alone users who
>read news on them.

I can say from personal experience that this is true.  Here at Berkeley,
the load on ucbvax seldom drops below about 4, even when no-one is
logged in.  Very few people are willing to put up with the loads
on ucbvax just to read news.  We have an alternative, which I am
not sure is handled by the survey program.  (Please note:  the scheme
I'm about to describe may in fact be very common at large, multi-
machine sites, but I don't have any experience with sites other
than Berkeley, so I may be pointing out something trivial.  If that
is the case, I apologize for wasting your time.)

Here, there are a few machines (ucbvax, ucbcad, and ucbjade, I
believe) that actually have news on them.  These machines presumeably
have the standard news programs available on them (I don't know;
I don't have an account on any of these machines).  They also have
a "news server".  The news server is much like the other Internet
servers, such as mail servers and ftp servers.  When another
machine (such as ucbmiro, the machine I'm using now) wants news
access, it opens a socket to a news server on ucbvax, ucbjade,
or ucbcad, and deals with articles through that interface (I just
LOVE EtherNets!).

We have a program called 'rrn' which is apparently 'rn' re-built
to deal with the server, instead of directly with the file system.
I'm not certain; I've never seen 'rn'.  In any case, my question
is whether or not the people on these 'non-news' machines are
included in the survey.  If they are not, then you are excluding
most of the news readers at Berkeley.

I'm not trying to run down the survey or the surveyor; I think
it is a good idea, and that a lot of thought has gone into it
to make the survey as accurate as possible.


Brent Chapman
ucbvax!miro!chapman
chapman@miro.berkeley.edu