ietf-nntp "Common NNTP Extensions" document updated

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Tue Dec 2 01:52:40 PST 1997


In local.nntp Vincent Archer <Vincent.Archer at hsc.fr> wrote:

>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.

That is nonsense. All you have to do is batch up the NEWNEWS requests that
come in over a period of, say, 1 minute (that would be 60 or so requests
on a busy site like Demon) and then make one pass over the history file
with all of them together. So no need to have the whole history file in
memory. And of course you only start at the point in the history file
corresponding to the earliest date in the batch - but there are lots of
simple hacks to arrange that.

You cannot ignore the fact that Demon, which must be about the largest
monolithic site on the whole Internet, actually _prefers_ NEWNEWS as the
normal way to provide feeds. If they can do it, then why not everyone
else?

But I would ask Clive whether Demon is prepared to release the code that
does this job. It is certainly time that INN caught up with reality.

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing-------------------------
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