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From: jhenders@wimsey.com (John Henders)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: News &FreeBSD
Date: 20 Dec 1995 18:59:25 -0800
Organization: Wimsey Information Services
Lines: 40
Distribution: inet
Message-ID: <4baiid$6o2@vanbc.wimsey.com>
References: <819230783.26685@loddon.demon.co.uk> <4b2pkd$o9b@news.quanta.com> <4b6u0o$hpi@tzlink.j51.com> <4b9b66$342@sidhe.hsc-sec.fr> <1995Dec20.163332.1@spcvxb.spc.edu>
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terry@spcvxb.spc.edu (Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr.) writes:
> In fact, we even run C News on our news machines, though that's mostly
>for historical reasons. We exchange news with about 10 backbone servers and
>have no problem keeping up (which is more than I can say for some of those
>backbone servers 8-).
How do you handle the duplicates with this setup? It would seem that
with multiple feeds you'd spend a lot of cycles unbatching articles you
already had.
> We feed about 100 customers varying amounts of news. Almost all of those
>customers have a single newsfeed (us). Our experience in over a year of
>heavy-duty newsfeeding is that our customers using C News are better able
>to keep up with the feed (compared to INN). In fact, if I telnet to a cus-
>tomer's NNTP port and IHAVE a Message-ID, with most of the C News customers
>the response is nearly instant, while many of the INN customers exhibit a
>second or so of "think time" before responding. This repeats for subsequent
>articles, so it isn't just a one-time startup thing.
This is because INN is checking to see if it has the article before
accepting it, which c-news and nntp don't do. This, as you note, makes
the nntp performance considerably faster, but can bog down the machine
later when unbatching.
I agree with you, however, that a site with a single feed and limited
resources would probably be better off with c-news, however, if a site
is attempting to get whatever you consider a "full feed" nowadays, I
also think it's unwise to rely on a single incoming feed, unless it's
very well run. As well, any site doing multiple large outgoing nntp
feeds would be well advised to look at nntplink in stdin mode, despite
what the INN faq says, as the performance improvements well outweight
the few drawbacks.
--
John Henders BOFH Wimsey Information Systems.
Vancouver's original internet service provider.
http://www.wimsey.com