Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!ncc!atha!lyndon
From: lyndon@cs.AthabascaU.CA (Lyndon Nerenberg)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: List of sites with broken Followup (No References) Software
Message-ID: <571@aurora.AthabascaU.CA>
Date: 11 May 89 18:16:49 GMT
References: <3222@looking.UUCP> <29126@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <3229@looking.UUCP>
Reply-To: lyndon@auvax.UUCP (Lyndon Nerenberg)
Organization: Athabasca University
Lines: 23

In article <3229@looking.UUCP> brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) writes:

>We are spending many megabytes storing and shipping these lines after all.

This caught my interest. Just how many megabytes *are* we shipping in
References headers? Well, two hours (real, not CPU :-) later I have
some numbers from the news directory tree on atha:

	Total bytes in References: headers:	1,175,870
	Total bytes in /usr/spool/news:	       80,886,000 *
	% of disk used by References: headers:	     1.45

[ Hmm, I wonder what percentage of the email byte count is devoted
  to Received: headers :-) ]

Given these numbers I don't consider the References: line to be
a significant overhead, especially when you consider the functionality
it adds.

I do think it's naive to expect BITNET (and other non-UUCP/Internet)
sites to start conforming to the RFC (no smiley).-- 
Lyndon Nerenberg   Computing Services   Athabasca University
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