Re: mailing list vs "the futur"
On Monday 27 August 2018 12:28:35 Dan Ritter wrote:
> 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.
>
My knowledge is based on a conversation I had with my then isp in about
1993 or so, so its entirely possible that the protocol has been changed
since then. What they had then struck me as very very wastefull of
resources. Because I was such a PITA, they actually built another
machine for NNTP and had at&t bring in another oc3 circuit to feed it. I
had what was a full house Amiga 2000 with 64 megs of ram on a PP&S 040
board, had a pair of 1GB scsi seagates, their machine had a 47GB drive,
which was filled in just an hour or so, so the expire was set at 8
hours. So the last thing I did at night was dial them up and grab what I
wanted that was new, and the first thing in the morning, the same.
Sheer economics has likely driven some major changes in how NNTP works
today. And I expect thats a hell of a lot better for the average ma & pa
isp. By the time I built a new machine and put red hat 5 on it, in 1998
I think, NNTP had degenerated to 90% spam, so I never rejoined that pool
party, it was too polluted for me. Email was easier to filter, and here
I am still, almost 20 years later, and older too, I'll be 84 in a couple
more months if I don't miss morning roll call first.
> 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-
Take care Dan.
--
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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