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Date:      Tue, 18 Apr 1995 13:24:30 +0300
From:      Petri Helenius <pete@silver.sms.fi>
To:        Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Cc:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: mmap bugs gone yet?
Message-ID:  <199504181024.NAA15219@silver.sms.fi>
In-Reply-To: <9504180423.AA05862@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
References:  <199504180323.AA16519@cardhu.cs.hut.fi> <9504180423.AA05862@brasil.moneng.mei.com>

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Joe Greco writes:
 > 
 > And here I thought that's what INN was.  :-)
 >
Me too. And from my experience working at ISP suggests the same. But INN's
shortcomings are becoming more visible each day. And INN is the most popular
news-software today. 

 > What NNTP failing in particular are we discussing, anyways?  NNTP throughput
 > rates due to turnaround times?  Bandwidth requirements to send complete
 > uncompressed text chunks?  I am not yet aware of any inherent limits to the
 > technology.  Sure, those of us running major backbone sites are using things
 > such as parallel nntplink processes to help circumvent problems inherent
 > when you're trying to push gigabytes of news daily, but I don't see this as
 > a deficiency in the protocol per se.
 >
Neither do I. The news community definetly does _not_ need another protocol
to replace NNTP. It would create a administrative nightmare.

 > What I _would_ like to see is a new generation of threaded news tools -
 > perhaps (most ideally) rolling the functionality of nntplink into INN, and
 > providing a mechanism that allows INN to open several concurrent NNTP
 > connections to a peer, multiplexed such that it appears to INN as a single
 > feed.
 >
I've thought about that but since an ISP does not pay my salary any longer
I've not done anything about it (and most likely will not get involved to
actual implementations) but I think I might be of help on my experience
of running. (though there is plenty of us who have been knee-deep in the
usenet-stuff, unfortunately ;)

 > Of course, this doesn't buy as much under FreeBSD as it would under Solaris.
 > That's not saying anything bad about FreeBSD, by the way, but I do believe
 > that there is something inherently threadable about news.
 >
I can agree you fully. 

 > Providing NNTP extensions to do NNTP command stacking and/or simple
 > batch/compression on the fly (for slow links) would be the next step.

Usually you most definetly don't have the CPU cycles to spare for a compressed
feed, so I would leave compression to the lower layers of networking. Most
of the routers do low-speed link compression nowadays and it's becoming
more popular when people upgrade their boxes to more recent software. Also
they usually manage to even lessen the latency with the compression.
(when it's done by the routers, not external boxes)

Pete



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