[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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