henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (12/29/83)
I have rearranged our polling system a little bit, to reduce calling
load without impairing service to our neighbors.
At the moment, once an hour we try to call all sites for whom we have
traffic waiting. This (as well as the obvious restriction on calling
times for long-distance calls) has been in effect for some time and will
remain so.
The other aspect is that we periodically generate null traffic for
various systems to force calls to them. The change I have made is to
move a number of sites from the null-traffic-hourly list to the
null-traffic-daily list. The null-traffic-hourly list now contains
only those sites who cannot call out and are dependent on polls by us,
plus one site (chp) which wants frequent calls just now for intensive
hardware+software testing.
This should, I hope, have no effect on actual service. Most affected
sites are ones that call us whenever *they* have traffic for *us*, so
the hourly polls weren't serving much purpose. To some extent they
were a hangover from days when our polling used a clumsier scheme.
(The one reduced-polling site not covered by this description, utcstvax,
is one that we are linked to only for historical reasons; essentially
no traffic flows by that route.)
Please let me know if this causes any problems. We still generate
null traffic for all non-long-distance sites once a day, as a precaution
against things like autodialer failure at such sites. Long-distance
polling schedules are unchanged.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry