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Date:      Fri, 18 Dec 1998 01:36:09 -0600
From:      George Wenzel <gee2@realtime.net>
To:        Bill Vermillion <bill@bilver.magicnet.net>
Cc:        freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Usenet performance issues (was Re: RAID solutions?)
Message-ID:  <367A05E9.2AE2@realtime.net>
References:  <199812171212.HAA00175@bilver.magicnet.net>

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Bill Vermillion wrote:
> 
> George Wenzel recently said:
> 
> > While we are talking about news, I should mention SkyCache.
> > (www.skycache.com)  Through Skycache, for a fraction of what
> > I nomally pay for bandwidth, I get a full news feed pulled off
> > of a dish sitting on my roof.  The news I get off of the dish
> > is fresh and always here before news from any of my NNTP peers
> > and backbone feeds (CWIX and Sprint).
> 
> How much later were the CWIX/Sprint articles than Skycache.  What
> about missing things because of weather problems, etc.  Is there a
> way to fill-in missing items.

Well, that is the beauty of the whole thing.  Skycache feeds me
most of the articles.  The articles are several minutes fresher
than both CWIX and Sprint.  But this is /not/ to bash Sprint and 
CWIX, because their news admins have done a bang-up job of stepping 
up to the task... A backbone network must go through fan-out to
distribute news.  Sprint and CWIX use distributed server farms
of some sort.  Skycache uses a satellite.  The difference is that 
end to end latency is lower if the only latency is getting to and 
from a satellite, and dealing with the packet latency of 
satellite related electronics.  So even if Sprint is real fast,
they are racing something that uses no CPU.  In any event the
stats show the whole story, every article that Skycach delivers
is at my server first, no exceptions.  Sprint and CWIX can then
serve as fill, which works perfectly.  I refuse most of what 
the pair offer, keeping my bandwidth consumption due to news
limited to background noise.
> 
> >INN was a GREAT improvement over Cnews (how many of you out
> > there remember Cnews?)...
> 
> Remeber it? I'm still running it. It's just a home news feed now -
> and only a good deal of comp and about 3 other threads. It's only
> for me and one friend. I must spend all of 15 minutes connect time
> getting this to my desktop :-) It did it's job in those days feeding
> about 20 other sites. Prior to that I was using Bnews. Six MB day
> was considered realy a big news day. And on a 4Mhz 68000 BPU with
> 1MB memory - you had to use minimum compression on the transmitted
> files, or else it would take longer to decompress them than it would
> for transmit.

Well.. I must be a youngster... I didn't start playing with news
untill Bnews was yesterday's server...  I remember cnews being mostly
shell scripts, though the last version I think had a lot more
compiled code making it faster...  Dejavu, At one point I was
excited because I got a satellite link to receive news on to
save bandwidth... 9600 baud from satellite delivered about 90%
of the news (eventually they had to go with compression which
ate precious CPU... now CPU outstrips IO).  I think I was posting
the same articles back then... in a different era it seems.

George

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