rayan@ai.toronto.edu (Rayan Zachariassen) (06/15/88)
Carl has been too busy to react much to this old message of mine, so I thought I would throw it up in the air in the hope someone will want to join. ------- Forwarded Message Date: Fri, 11 Mar 88 15:36:19 -0500 From: Rayan Zachariassen <rayan@ephemeral.ai> To: csg@pyramid.UUCP I just got a meek plea from one of my UUCP neighbours on the east coast (of Canada), asking "do you know anything about BSMTP? we want to bunch up all the small files that are being transferred". My answer to them will be that I know a lot about BSMTP, but that it is pretty useless in this context since the UUCP subsystem isn't prepared to actively solicit traffic from an external source (a queue of messages, say, that have to be packaged somehow before transmission). Because the inter-file overhead on fast links (w/ telebits say, as in this case) is swamping the fast transfer rate of actual data. I assume this is a problem for all sites, including yours, considering messages are typically between a few hundred bytes and a few k in size. If transfer time is 2 seconds average, and overhead is 2 seconds per file, line utilization is lousy. So why am I troubling you with this tale of woe? (here comes the good part...:) because I think it is about time we face the inevitable (mods to uucico to allow such features), and that it is better a standard is established now by a bunch of people who know whats is going on and what the needs are, rather than 2-3 new UUCP implementations doing their own thing, or providing unusable facilities for this. Also, you know a bit about the guts of v7-derived uucp's, so its natural to point the finger at you :-) My point is, that due to the speed advances of modems this kind of thing is no longer a "blue sky" ``nice'' feature, it is turning into a necessity. My suggestion is that a few UUCP people, say a couple per 4bsd, HDB, and the new UUCP's being written (2 I can think of), along with a few mailer people (me for my mailer, someone representing sendmail, MMDF perhaps, etc.), stick our heads together and hash out a design for this. The blueprint will then be available when someone wants to implement it in uucico, and in the mailers. I'm of course hoping that you (or someone) do it for bsd uucp, and someone for gnu uucp, etc., but considering the timescale that is not the immediate concern. Comments? Think people would be interested in participating in a small design discussion group? rayan ------- End of Forwarded Message Well?