From owner-freebsd-isp Thu Mar 27 15:01:57 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id PAA00950 for isp-outgoing; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 15:01:57 -0800 (PST) Received: from absinthe.i3inc.com (Absinthe.stonos.washington.dc.us [206.27.237.33]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id PAA00944 for ; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 15:01:52 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by absinthe.i3inc.com (8.7.2/8.7.2) with SMTP id SAA00541 for ; Thu, 27 Mar 1997 18:00:15 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199703272300.SAA00541@absinthe.i3inc.com> X-Authentication-Warning: absinthe.i3inc.com: Host localhost [127.0.0.1] didn't use HELO protocol To: isp@freebsd.org Subject: Caching news proxy? X-Mailer: Mew version 1.03 on Emacs 19.34.1 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Thu, 27 Mar 1997 18:00:15 -0500 From: Chris Shenton Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Our small ISP doesn't want to run a news-server due to administrative overhead, hardware investment, and bandwidth consumption. Our upstream provider will let us read from them for a fee-per-connection. So maybe we order 10 simultaneous connections. But Netscape reads news by opening up a bunch of connections at once to the same server, preventing others after our max connections are used. Other concerns about more users than news connections prevail of course. Seems to me if I had a news proxy it would only consume one connection to our news provider. If it cached retrieved articles -- and there was any semblance of coherence in our subscribers' reading habits -- we could save significant bandwidth to our upstream provider. Any thoughts?