At 5:35 PM +0200 2/18/97, Alan Barrett wrote:

On 18 Feb 1997, Bryan Reece wrote:

...

Filtering out other gateways' messages will reduce load at the possible expense of delay (assuming a smallish network of news servers that feed each other the list; obviously the message will flood the majordomo net before it floods the real usenet unless something is seriously broken).

Why is it obvious that mail propagation will be faster than news propagation? News propagation times of small numbers of seconds are not at all uncommon.

News propagation in seconds to your _local server_, or to _distant_ servers? Articles I post do indeed appear "immediately" on my local site, but certainly not so immediately on distant sites. The Usenet is thousands of news servers, maybe tens of thousands, and news feeds take a while...small articles are mixed in with hundreds of megabytes a day of binaries. A percolation process, as opposed to a point-to-point process for e-mail. And I know that my site sometimes does not see articles for tens of hours, even days, after the initial act of distribution. (Sometimes articles appear more than a week late...presumably they've been lost to mu site on some railroad siding someplace.) This is why people say "News is slower than mail." --Tim May Just say "No" to "Big Brother Inside" We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed. ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1398269 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."