emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti) (06/30/90)
I was curious as to how heavily used the NSFnet backbone was for NNTP traffic. Some (though certainly not all) of the useful raw data is available from nis.nsf.net in the STATS directory; the file NSFyy-mm.PORTS gives the traffic breakdown by port for traffic which passes through the NSSes. As you can see, traffic is growing at a healthy clip, doubling in just under 9 months. It also looks as though NNTP traffic is staying at about the same fraction of overall network usage, hovering in at around 11-12%. By point of comparison, VMNET (BITNET II) traffic rose in absolute terms to just about 100M packets, but has been declining in relative terms from a high of 5.4% down to about 3.4% of total traffic. On the other hand, FTP traffic has gone from 17.5% of the total up to almost 24%; the big jump came in Jan 90 when FTP data jumped from 367M packets to 522M packets. I suspect that X11R4 had something to do with that. I don't imagine that the NSFnet is going to stop passing NNTP traffic any time soon, given the general utility of netnews and its relatively steady-state consumption of backbone resources. It would seem to be reasonable to suggest the following for those people who are setting up NNTP connections to try to minimize the number of hops that the bulk of their incoming traffic has to traverse; in particular, if you are a leaf site on the left coast, it would hardly make sense to get all of your news from a single site on the right coast. NSF89-08.PORTS: nntp 119 156,203,409 11.578 NSF89-09.PORTS: nntp 119 198,647,273 13.161 NSF89-10.PORTS: nntp 119 205,263,003 11.962 NSF89-11.PORTS: nntp 119 237,806,649 12.287 NSF89-12.PORTS: nntp 119 223,701,824 11.604 NSF90-01.PORTS: nntp 119 241,124,672 10.951 NSF90-02.PORTS: nntp 119 268,790,579 11.623 NSF90-03.PORTS: nntp 119 287,652,752 11.400 NSF90-04.PORTS: nntp 119 308,344,616 11.451 NSF90-05.PORTS: nntp 119 333,694,048 11.718 --Ed Edward Vielmetti, U of Michigan math dept <emv@math.lsa.umich.edu> comp.archives moderator