1997-09-05 - Usenet Propagation Sucks

Header Data

From: Mark Hedges <hedges@sirius.infonex.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Message Hash: 710bdad4e7022e5ba3d9f9d28102aa0546f6e6f9affe79610988023c147b28d0
Message ID: <199709052156.OAA11226@sirius.infonex.com>
Reply To: N/A
UTC Datetime: 1997-09-05 22:06:57 UTC
Raw Date: Sat, 6 Sep 1997 06:06:57 +0800

Raw message

From: Mark Hedges <hedges@sirius.infonex.com>
Date: Sat, 6 Sep 1997 06:06:57 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Usenet Propagation Sucks
Message-ID: <199709052156.OAA11226@sirius.infonex.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Mike Duvos <enoch@zipcon.net> wrote Fri 29 Aug 1997:
>Theoretically, I was under the impression that Usenet consisted of a large
>number of machines, which compared their news spools continuously, with
>each giving the other all articles that were not on both machines. 
> 
>Practically, this seems to work a lot less well than the designers
>envisioned.

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. 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. Plus the damn thing's
history database has to be rebuilt twice a month, and at night lest the
customers come for blood when they don't get their daily usenet, and it
never seems to go right without someone (me namely) sleeping in the office
keeping it company during the process.

A server would need terabyte upon terabyte to store a good archive
of Usenet for, say, the past year.

I wonder if the designers could forsee Usenet's explosive popularity,
or the taxing load the spammers place.

Mark Hedges






Thread