Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!steinmetz!welty
From: welty@steinmetz.ge.com (richard welty)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: listservers as an alternative to news for distribution
Summary: (was Re: A counter-example for those who would eliminate PC binaries)
Message-ID: <11457@steinmetz.ge.com>
Date: 3 Jul 88 02:18:00 GMT
References: <264@octopus.UUCP> <3302@s.cc.purdue.edu> <1988Jul1.043049.2418@ziebmef.uucp> <3335@s.cc.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: welty@steinmetz.UUCP (richard welty)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 38

In article <1988Jul1.043049.2418@ziebmef.uucp> becker@ziebmef.UUCP (Bruce Becker) writes:
*	it seems like the time to look at the practice of other systems -
*	in specific, I am familiar with BitNet, which send out descriptions
*	of available binaries (source, documents, etc), and issues a pointer
*	to a thing called a "listserver"...

*	It seems to me that this uses far less net bandwidth than the
*	broadcasting method, and serves the community equally well...

In article <3335@s.cc.purdue.edu> rsk@s.cc.purdue.edu.UUCP (Rich Kulawiec) writes:
>An extreme example, but more complicated topologies and cost distributions
>eventually lead one to the same conclusion: if enough people at enough
>sites want the source, it's cheaper to post it.  Some years ago, I think
>Chuq did some analysis of this problem, and concluded that the tradeoff
>was somewhere around 100 people, in terms of overall network bandwidth.

Chuq has stated that his analysis is now probably somewhat out of date,
and recently guessed that the number was likely to be more like 200
(as I recall -- I did not save his article, unfortunately.

>Clearly, however, this is a huge lose for the originating site, which
>must send 100 copies of something rather than 1.

It can be a huge lossage for links adjacent to the originating site
as well.  When I ran the auto-sports mailing list off of steinmetz,
more than 40 of the addresses were being directed by pathalias through
the phone link between rochester and steinmetz, which was pretty expensive.
We attempted to configure sendmail here on steinmetz to fold addresses,
but the copy that we have here (on an ultrix system) does not support
the appropriate options.

Of course, with a listserver, folding the addresses (if your sendmail
can do it) would require batching requests, because otherwise the
folding would not be possible.
-- 
Richard Welty  518-387-6346  GE R&D, K1-5C39, Niskayuna, New York
   welty@ge-crd.ARPA  {uunet,philabs,rochester}!steinmetz!welty
    ``I always wondered what that switch did'' -- Aaron Heller