Re: mailing list vs "the futur"

[Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org>]

On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 11:37:48AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> 
> That bandwidth limit is not on your side of the isp, its the bandwidth 
> from the main trunk lines to the isp. NNTP is a huge bandwidth hog 
> regardless of how much of it your isp accepts for spooling on local disk 
> to serve you.
> 

This is not the case.

The NNTP server-to-server algorithm is analogous to rsync,
if you think of:

    - each message is a file
    - each newsgroup is a directory
    - if the receiver doesn't have a directory, it won't be
      sync'd over from the sender
    - the sender/receiver don't bother looking at contents
      of each file to decide whether to update, just the name-timestamp

And it always goes in exactly one direction; when the receiver
wants to send messages back upstream, that's a different
connection in which they swap places.

NNTP is a bandwidth hog in exactly the same proportion as the
space it occupies on disk.

I have simplified for the sake of a familiar analogy.

-dsr-