Minutes ... (nntpxmit)

[Erik E. Fair]

Running nntpsend often is entirely an exercise in making news flow more
quickly. If everyone is running with what we recommended in the
original NNTP release (every 10 minutes), then it takes an hour to go
six hops. I'd like to see it take six minutes (i.e. run nntpsend every
minute). If you read Rick Adams' UUNET statistics posted in news.lists
every two weeks, I'm looking to push the initial wave of traffic to the
first hour, and spread it out more evenly.

This isn't a strictly statistical goal either; netnews is fast becoming
the computer conferecing system of the Internet, but it is still not as
fast as Internet mail. Fortunately, with your help, this can be fixed.

Currently, ucbvax and apple are both running 1 minute nntpsend (I just
took that first field in the /usr/lib/crontab file and turned it into a
star "*"). I know that other backbone sites are running faster than 10
minutes too. It hasn't put much of a load on the systems because we're
moving just as many bytes as before - the load is just spread out
more evenly, rather than spiking every 10 minutes...

	Erik E. Fair	apple!fair	fair at apple.com

P.S.	let's move the discussion out of comp.org.usenix to
	news.software.nntp.