henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/23/85)
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!henrymajka@ubc-vision.UUCP (Marc Majka) (07/24/85)
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
dave@lsuc.UUCP (David Sherman) (07/24/85)
Henry raises a good point. I think the Canadian subnet is small and
controlled enough that we can consider doing something about it.
Take net.flame, for example. The net at large has been discussing
whether it should be removed. I think the Canadian subnet can
hold a similar discussion in parallel. In some ways, if the
US net decides to keep net.flame but we decided we could live
without it, things would be better for us.
There are three problems which results from noise on the net:
(1) wasted reading time
(2) wasted disk space
(3) high phone bills (in Toronto, particularly to utzoo)
(1) can be solved by anyone, if they can put their addictions to
sleep, but turning off newsgroups. (Of course, then they lose the
important material in those groups, but that's a netwide problem,
not a Canadian problem.) [Shall we form a Usenetholics Anonymous?
When you get the urge to type "rn", you send mail to your UA counsellor
instead :-)]
(2) is, I think, not that much of a concern. Most sites with full
feeds these days have large disks, and an entire 2-week Usenet feed
still doesn't take a significant fraction of an Eagle (15/414ths).
(3) is obviously a problem. But we may be able to solve it via
cheaper communications links (2400 baud, or X.25).
--
{ ihnp4!utzoo pesnta utcs hcr decvax!utcsri } !lsuc!davesteve@hcradm.UUCP (Steve Pozgaj) (07/24/85)
The posting from Henry Spencer about utzoo's being "less and less
happy with the ever-rising tide of gossip" brings to mind an old
cliche:
People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Take that for what it's worth.
Steve Pozgaj, HCR
{decvax,utzoo,watmath}!hcr!stevehenry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/24/85)
I should have made a couple of points clearer in my posting:
1. I'm not saying "clean up your act, folks". I doubt that the Canadian
contributors to the various newsgroups account for enough material
to make much difference.
2. I wasn't, actually, referring to the phone-bill problem (although it is
a very real problem). I was thinking more of the general issue:
we are spending money on phones, spending cpu cycles on processing,
spending disk space on storage, spending human effort on resolving
problems with news flow, and tying up our modems for a non-trivial
fraction of each day... for what? Looking at the "top 25" listing,
I get an overwhelming impression that the cost/benefit ratio is poor
already and steadily getting worse. Barring disasters, the limiting
factor is more likely to be fed-up news administrators rather than
excessive phone bills.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henrybrad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton) (07/25/85)
It would be interesting to take a poll to find out the real facts. A message in each group with can or ont distribution saying, "This group will be deleted if nobody sends in a message saying they find it valuable" We might even find that nobody is seriously reading many groups. Just to save disk space, I don't even send net.politics, net.religion and net.flame to my machine. -- Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/25/85)
> The posting from Henry Spencer about utzoo's being "less and less > happy with the ever-rising tide of gossip" brings to mind an old > cliche: > > People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Who, me, gossip? Impossible. Perish the thought. Nah. :-) More seriously, my frequent yielding to temptation doesn't invalidate my comments. As I mentioned in my followup, even if the entire Canadian subnet (including me) shut up, it probably wouldn't improve things much. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
lionel@garfield.UUCP (Lionel H. Moser) (07/26/85)
> > 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 Another useful statistic would be the cost (real $) of telephone bills to support this net. I asked our system manager about this, and ours is $500/week. We get net.* . Lionel H. Moser Department of Computer Science Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's, Newfoundland Canada A1C 5S7 Longitude: 52 deg 44 min 10 sec W; Latitude: 47 deg 34 min 20 sec N UUCP: {mcvax, ihnp4, utcsri, allegra} !garfield!lionel BELL: (709) 737-8640
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/26/85)
> A message in each group with can or ont distribution saying, "This group > will be deleted if nobody sends in a message saying they find it valuable" Unfortunately, I strongly suspect that most every major group is read by *somebody* in Canada who would hate to see it vanish. I have given up on finding a solution that will make everybody happy. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (07/26/85)
> 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