Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!xanth!kent
From: kent@xanth.cs.odu.edu (Kent Paul Dolan)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics
Subject: Re: RFC - comp.binaries.gif
Keywords: fair play
Message-ID: <5326@xanth.cs.odu.edu>
Date: 25 May 88 01:07:19 GMT
References: <4358@dasys1.UUCP> <194300027@trsvax>
Reply-To: kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan)
Followup-To: talk.bizarre
Organization: Old Dominion University, Norfolk Va.
Lines: 25

In article <194300027@trsvax> johnm@trsvax.UUCP writes:
>
[About a proposed binary visual images newsgroup:]
>I just worry about the amount of traffic such a group would have on it.
[...examples of 300K/day postings, possibly much worse...]  How will
>we prevent this from happening?  I don't want to lose sites because
>of a big fiasco and we're already wasting enough bandwidth with
>talk.bizarre.

This always floors me.  Last time I looked at the news.lists postings,
all the talk newsgroups together comprise 12%, or 1/8th of the total
net traffic volume, yet one "just for fun" newsgroup, talk.bizarre, is
going to bring the net to its knees?  Get real.  Right now on xanth,
our 4 day backlog of talk.bizarre postings is taking up 399K, or about
the equivalent of _seven_ postings in your proposed .gif newsgroup,
and this is 234 talk.bizarre postings.  This constitutes a bit under
2% of our retained news holdings, and we expired the sources and
binaries groups by hand a couple days back because they overflowed
/news by all going into high volume phase together, for the second
time in a month, so that is an unrealisticly high estimate of the
impact of talk.bizarre.  I guess any press is better than being
forgotten, but no thoughtful person uses talk.bizarre as a whipping
boy for the net traffic problems.

Kent, the man from xanth.