[ietf-nntp] :bytes metadata

[Ken Murchison]

Andrew - Supernews wrote:

> That's a substantial implementation overhead - an implementation that
> stores articles in wire format never has any need to compute or store
> the "canonical" size of the article.
> 
> There are three possible sizes of an article: the size as stored
> locally, the canonical size, and the wire-format size. There are two
> common cases:

Again, this decison should be made by what the client needs/expects, not 
server design.  If the client only needs a "not to exceed" approximation 
of the message size, then using the either canonical size or wire format 
size is fine and we document it as such.  If the client expects the 
*exact* canonical size, then we have a problem.  My guess is that an 
approximation is good enough.

> IMAP clusters don't normally have to handle multi-gigabit loads.

Regardless of the load, most, if not all, mail clusters that I'm aware 
of only have one copy of each message, so the problem of differing 
message sizes/contents never occurs.

-- 
Kenneth Murchison     Oceana Matrix Ltd.
Software Engineer     21 Princeton Place
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