ietf-nntp New wording on article numbers

[William H. Magill]

>   >     Article numbers MUST lie between 1 and 999999999 inclusive [this allows
>   >     one article per second for 31 years]. The client and server SHOULD NOT
>   >     use leading zeroes in specifying article numbers. If the server loses
>   >     record of the most recent article number in a group, it MUST reset to a
>   >     higher article number.
>
>   I'd remove the part about one article per second for 31 years.  It could
>   be said that a million sites posting an article a day will use this range
>   up in 3 years and it would be just as meaningless. 
>
>   If we're gonna stick to 32 bits, I'd say we should at least use the full
>   32 bits (1 to 4,294,967,295) to give us slightly more leg room.  Our
>   control.cancel is up to 4 million now and I expect it to pass a billion in
>   a few years. 
>
>   If Usenet (as an example ;-) continues to grow as it has, we may eat this
>   space pretty quickly in which case we either need to expand the range to
>   64 bits and/or precisely define how to handle rollovers.  I'd love to see
>   us do both, but I don't think I have much support in that department.  Or
>   do I? 
>
Penn runs INN on an AXP 2100 under Digital Unix, so I'm all for 64 bits!
        (http://www.upenn.edu/dccs/news/faq/faq-conf-server.html)

As for 1 article per second - we passed that mark almost 2 years ago.
We cleared 1.1 article per second back in April of 95.
        (http://www.upenn.edu/dccs/news/status/historical.html)

This is a "slow week" - From Flowstats (24 hour periods):

12/27   126595  1.5 articles per-second
12/26   106432  1.2
12/25    81432   .9
12/24   108658  1.2
12/23   136902  1.5
12/21   125610  1.4

According to my last INN weekly report, for the period 12/17-12/23 we
"took" (via nntplink) 1,570,280 articles, roughly 2.5/second

And we don't even take most of the alt.* groups! 
(Only 6548 non "upenn.*" entries in newsgroups). 

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill                          Senior Systems Administrator
Information Services and Computing (ISC)   University of Pennsylvania
Internet: magill at isc.upenn.edu             magill at acm.org
          magill at upenn.edu                 http://pobox.upenn.edu/~magill/