[ietf-nntp] OVER message-id
Russ Allbery
rra at stanford.edu
Fri Dec 19 10:10:38 PST 2003
Ken Murchison <ken at oceana.com> writes:
> This is the point I was trying to make. I would assume every server has
> a mapping from msgid to group/article#.
No, this is exactly the mapping that most news servers do not maintain,
except possibly in an extremely round-about fashion requiring parsing of
the article headers. And not necessarily even then.
INN for instance separately maintains mappings from message ID to article
in the spool and from group/article# to article in the spool, but from
group/article# you can get message ID, not the other way around.
One of the reasons why things are done this way is because the mapping
from message ID to group/article# is essentially never used, and due to
crossposting it doesn't have a fixed length. The database keyed on
message ID is one of the most performance-critical portions of a news
server, so most server designs I'm aware of hash the message ID so that
all of the data stored in that index is fixed length for speed.
--
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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