Usenet Propagation Sucks

Matthew Ghio ghio at temp0110.myriad.ml.org
Sat Sep 6 14:54:55 PDT 1997



Mark Hedges <hedges at sirius.infonex.com> wrote:

> In practice, it's really tough to keep a good feed going. We happen
> to keep the alt.anon* stuff for a longer period of time.

As do I.  The use of alt.anonymous.messages as an anonymous message pool
has become quite popular lately, to the point where the traffic often
reaches several MB per day.


> We've started keeping individual groups longer as requested by readers.
> This makes them happy, for the most part. It needs so much disk! We have
> two incoming server feeds and three outgoing and people still complain
> that their groups don't have enough messages for their liking.
...
> A server would need terabyte upon terabyte to store a good archive
> of Usenet for, say, the past year.

Actually, I am suprised at how small a segment of the internet populace
actually posts.  Can you imagine what would happen if a hundred million
people posted every day?  You'd need a terabyte for just one day!

One nice thing is that it is highly redundant, most usenet traffic can
be compressed by a 4:1 ratio.  You could probably fit your one-year
archive into a few hundred GB.

Long-term, it would probably be more reasonable to have people just store
and forward the groups that they are interested in, more like mailing
lists.  But I must admit that I read this list via nntp, because it's
just so much easier to have everything in one place, so until things
seriously break, I suspect most people will want to have big nntp servers
with everything on them.







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