[NNTP] Compressed LIST (and other commands) answers

[Urs Janßen]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 03:50:42PM +0000, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
> > just adding compression for multiline server -> client responses would be a
> > big win
> 
> How big?
> 
> If it's only LIST ACTIVE and OVER, how much do these get used?

tin usualy sends "LIST ACTIVE" (and LIST NEWSGROUPS) at startup and OVER
for each group entered during the session. It may resend LIST ACTIVE during
the session.

on my small server I have 1481 groups in the active file:

akk3% zcat active.gz| wc
   1481    5924   65629
akk3% mimencode -b < active.gz| wc
    373     373   27185

that will be a win of 58.5% or 37kb

on a server with 17277 groups that would be

akk3% zcat big-active | wc 
  17277   69108  809175
akk3% mimencode -b < big-active.gz | wc  
   4698    4698  342946

57.5% / 455KB win.

as for OVER, in a group with about 3100 articles (deep nested thread in
there), plain OVER data is:

akk3% zcat over.gz | wc 
   3099  103293 2257618
akk3% mimencode -b < over.gz | wc 
   3110    3110  226990

which will be a win of 89% or 1.9mb

urs
-- 
"Only whimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff
 on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)" - Linus