Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!mailrus!ames!elroy!cit-vax!mangler
From: mangler@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (Don Speck)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Usenet volume
Summary: article sizes by top-level group
Keywords: volume news
Message-ID: <8920@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: 19 Dec 88 03:11:56 GMT
References: <1995@van-bc.UUCP> <1275@vsi1.UUCP> <2707@epimass.EPI.COM>
Organization: California Institute of Technology
Lines: 24

In article <2707@epimass.EPI.COM>, jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes:
> Fortunately, average article size has been steadily decreasing

The comp groups have a larger average article size than the others.
The non-comp groups are proliferating faster, pulling down the
overall average.  But partial-feed sites do not see this trend:
instead, they may see an *increase* in average size, as volume
forces them to drop rec, soc, and talk groups.

      average size  bytes   articles
gnu   --> 4928	     1.7%     0.8%
comp  --> 3211	    40.4%    29.1%
sci	  2093	     4.1%     4.5%
misc	  1733	     4.4%     5.8%
news	  1813	     1.4%     1.8%
rec	  1845	    26.5%    33.2%
soc	  2012	     9.3%    10.6%
talk	  2096	     7.8%     8.5%
alt	  1825	     3.8%     4.8%
ca	  1897	     0.7%     0.9%
TOTAL --> 2308	     100%     100%

(I modified "du" to report bytes instead of kilobytes, and ran it
on our feed's /usr/spool/news).