ietf-nntp "Common NNTP Extensions" document updated

James Fidell james at ops.netcom.net.uk
Mon Dec 1 02:43:45 PST 1997


Quoting Vincent Archer (Vincent.Archer at hsc.fr):

> Are all of your customers using NEWNEWS? How big is your server physical
> memory? Because, unless you have a server specifically designed to use
> NEWNEWS feeding (i.e. indexing on an article's date in addition to the
> message-id), any call to NEWNEWS will end up pulling the full history base
> in memory. If your server hasn't enough physical memory, the 2nd requester
> will reload the history from disk again.

Any ISP as big as Demon should have realised this a long time ago.  However,
you're only discussing INN's implementation of NEWNEWS and Demon don't run
any version of INN that you'd recognise.  It's quite possible to implement
NEWNEWS without this kind of memory hit.

> The only conclusion I can derive from this is "Your mileage may vary".
> However, I strongly believe that any RFC which insists on the presence of
> the NEWNEWS command on servers will simply end up ignored, because for a
> very large number of implementations of the NNTP protocol, NEWNEWS is
> considered harmful. We may disagree on the usefulness of NEWNEWS, but I
> sure don't want a RFC that people will ignore because it goes against
> established usage.

Agreed.  I'd like to see a fully specified NEWNEWS command, but as an
optional part of the specification rather than a requirement.

James.
-- 
 "Yield to temptation --             | NETCOM: james at corp.netcom.net.uk
  it may not pass your way again"    | Consultancy: james at cloud9.co.uk
                                     | http://www.netcom.net.uk/~james/
        - Lazarus Long               |              James Fidell



More information about the ietf-nntp mailing list