ietf-nntp 32/64 bit question

Clive D.W. Feather clive at demon.net
Sat Oct 11 09:17:33 PDT 2003


Anton Chr. Lauridsen said:
> I am afraid that I am opening up an old debate, but considering that
> this protocol is going to live for quite some years into the future
> wouldn't it be appropriate to remove the 32 bit limitation on article
> numbers?

We did discuss this before, a few years ago. I'll try to remember what we
said at the time.

> After all nothing prevents servers to remain at a 32 bit value
> internally if the implementer does not want to "waste" the additional 4
> bytes per message.

True, however that's a minor point.

> Newsreaders on the other hand will be dimensioned
> according to this limitation.

That depends what "dimensioned" means. One issue is that the number goes
across the link as text; 32 bits is 10 digits, and 64 bits would be 20. It
would also require *all* clients to cope with 64 bit numbers, which will be
an imposition on many. It would also make a lot of existing clients be
immediately non-conforming.

> In an not all to distant future megabit
> connections and terabyte disks will be commonplace.

But will article numbers run out?

Consider a group that receives ten postings every second without fail.
It will take that group over 13 *years* to reach the 32 bit limit. At which
point the admin can do a one-off renumbering and alert her users.

On Demon's server the following groups exceed 8 million posts so far:

alt.binaries.movies.divx.french      9295328
alt.binaries.sounds.misc             9871351
alt.binaries.multimedia.scifi       10187038
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.holland     11088155
alt.binaries.misc                   11240868
alt.binaries.movies.divx            11663187
alt.binaries.cd.image.games         12006436
alt.binaries.warez.quebec-hackers   12215628
alt.binaries.cd.image               12714338
alt.binaries.vcdz                   13008267
alt.binaries.dvd                    15191843
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3             15741498
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.complete    17871921
alt.binaries.cd.image.xbox          18476440
alt.binaries.svcd                   19104207
alt.binaries.multimedia             23400417
control.cancel                      38590936

Even control.cancel is less than 1% of the way to the limit.
alt.binaries.multimedia seems to be getting about 45000 posts per day. At
that rate it will take until 2264 to reach the limit. I don't think it's a
serious problem, and it certainly doesn't justify breaking clients.

-- 
Clive D.W. Feather  | Work:  <clive at demon.net>   | Tel:    +44 20 8495 6138
Internet Expert     | Home:  <clive at davros.org>  | *** NOTE CHANGE ***
Demon Internet      | WWW: http://www.davros.org | Fax:    +44 870 051 9937
Thus plc            |                            | Mobile: +44 7973 377646



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