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Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: storm warning
Message-ID: <5815@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23-Jul-85 11:50:25 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.5815
Posted: Tue Jul 23 11:50:25 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Jul-85 11:50:25 EDT
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 14
Connoisseurs of netnews at Toronto-area sites, and sites fed from Toronto-
area sites, should be aware that some of the system administrators near
the root of the local tree -- notably utzoo and utcs -- are getting less
and less happy with the ever-rising tide of gossip. It is particularly
troubling that, of the 25 newsgroups accounting for 70% of the traffic,
only 4 are indisputably technical (9 if you give the benefit of the doubt
to various borderline cases), and none of these is in the top 10.
This is not an announcement of cutbacks. Yet. Consider it, as the title
suggests, a storm warning. Constructive suggestions are welcome. Flames
will be ignored.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
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Path: utzoo!utcsri!ubc-vision!majka
From: majka@ubc-vision.UUCP (Marc Majka)
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: re: storm warning
Message-ID: <1009@ubc-vision.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23-Jul-85 17:08:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: ubc-visi.1009
Posted: Tue Jul 23 17:08:08 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Jul-85 05:08:57 EDT
Organization: UBC Computational Vision Lab, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 12
Henry, would you please post some of the statistics involved in the storm?
What are the top groups, and how much do they contribute to the volume of
news? What are the costs, in CPU usage and in money spent on maintaining
news?
It would be interesting and informative to compare these sorts of figures
from various sites, not just UT. Does anyone else out there have any
numbers?
---
Marc Majka - UBC Laboratory for Computational Vision
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Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: can.general
Subject: re: storm warning
Message-ID: <5830@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 26-Jul-85 12:22:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.5830
Posted: Fri Jul 26 12:22:08 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 26-Jul-85 12:22:08 EDT
References: <1009@ubc-vision.UUCP>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 60
> Henry, would you please post some of the statistics involved in the storm?
> What are the top groups, and how much do they contribute to the volume of
> news?
For the benefit of those who don't get/read mod.newslists, here is seismo's
latest list of top groups. This doesn't include the Canadian groups, since
seismo is a US site, but the Canadian groups (with the possible exception
of can.politics :-)) are not that big anyway. This list covers only the
last two weeks, but is probably reasonably representative of recent times.
It's also probably fairly representative of the situation at most places,
since most traffic is net-wide.
-----
No. of $ Cost % of Cumulative
Rank Kbytes Articles per Site Total % of Total Group (Articles/contributor)
1 1012.3 50 31.63 10.9% 10.9% net.sources.mac (1.9)
2 479.3 397 14.98 5.2% 16.1% net.singles (2.7)
3 446.3 65 13.95 4.8% 20.9% net.sources (1.5)
4 408.3 287 12.76 4.4% 25.3% net.women (2.4)
5 320.6 134 10.02 3.5% 28.7% net.origins (3.4)
6 293.0 217 9.16 3.2% 31.9% net.politics (2.3)
7 273.0 303 8.53 2.9% 34.8% net.music (2.8)
8 259.1 442 8.10 2.8% 37.6% net.sf-lovers (3.7)
9 249.2 19 7.79 2.7% 40.3% net.sources.games (1.7)
10 248.1 247 7.75 2.7% 42.9% net.movies (2.0)
11 231.3 239 7.23 2.5% 45.4% net.flame (1.8)
12 204.8 120 6.40 2.2% 47.6% net.unix (2.1)
13 197.0 89 6.16 2.1% 49.8% net.religion.christian (2.8)
14 188.0 241 5.88 2.0% 51.8% net.lang.c (2.1)
15 174.7 179 5.46 1.9% 53.7% net.micro.pc (1.5)
16 174.1 52 5.44 1.9% 55.5% net.religion (2.3)
17 173.7 67 5.43 1.9% 57.4% net.philosophy (2.7)
18 160.1 211 5.00 1.7% 59.1% net.unix-wizards (1.7)
19 156.5 272 4.89 1.7% 60.8% net.jokes (1.6)
20 154.8 146 4.84 1.7% 62.5% net.micro.mac (1.5)
21 146.0 74 4.56 1.6% 64.1% net.politics.theory (3.5)
22 141.1 169 4.41 1.5% 65.6% net.physics (3.1)
23 138.9 174 4.34 1.5% 67.1% net.micro (2.5)
24 128.8 100 4.02 1.4% 68.5% net.news (2.2)
25 121.5 161 3.80 1.3% 69.8% net.consumers (1.5)
$ Cost is the cost of sending it over a 1200 baud, long distance, phone link
presuming $0.15 per minute and 800 baud effective throughput.
-----
> What are the costs, in CPU usage and in money spent on maintaining news?
As for CPU and disk usage, news is running well in excess of a megabyte
per day. You can make your own guesses as to how much effort is needed
to process that much swill each and every day.
News maintenance per se is not a big cost item, but it's a noticeable
commitment on the part of the sysadmins involved. Links fail or have
troubles, recurrences of the line-eater bug have to be traced, that
sort of thing. It's just a little cut that won't stop bleeding. If 90%
of the traffic were interesting technical material, it wouldn't be so
irritating.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry