jim@TYCHO.ARPA (James B. Houser) (07/30/85)
I was wondering how much overhead is involved in a bboard. Since I already had a SED script to remove most of the junk it only took a few minutes work with sort and whatever to generate a rough tally. My source material was a good sized chunk of UNIX-WIZARDS and INFO-UNIX message text. The text file was 18572 lines or 1464 (V6) blocks After striping out overhead it had 10118 lines or 1027 (V6) blocks The lines of overhead added up to 8454 lines or 437 (V6) blocks This means that overhead was 45% by lines and 30% by size. This is much less than I would have expected. I tried to be very liberal about what constituted real text and so this is probably a lower bound. A interesting question would be what happens when you then consider the the lower level overhead due to IP and whatever. It was not my intent to be critical of the internet but instead simple curiosity that sparked this. The actual line item count follows. While there may be some question as to what overhead this is what I chose. One thing I did notice was some variety in header labels, for example In-reply-to: and In-Reply- To:. used interchangably. 3365 Blank Lines 1336 Lines of "Repeated Messages of the "> XXX" type 515 Lines of "From XXX" 498 Lines of "Date: XXX" 497 Lines of "Subject: XXX" 494 Lines of "To: XXX" 371 Lines of "-----------------------------" 364 Lines of "Received: XXX" 204 Lines of "Re: XXX" 128 Lines of "Return-Path" 127 Lines of Miscelaneous Junk Overhead 121 Lines of "XXX ;000000000000" 85 Lines of "UUCP: XXX" 38 Lines of "Reply-To: XXX" 37 Lines of "INFO-UNIX Digest XXX" 37 Lines of "End of INFO-UNIX Digest" 35 Lines of "Message-ID: XXX" 35 Lines of "ARPA: XXX" 24 Lines of "Nf-ID: XXX" 24 Lines of "Nf-From: XXX" 22 Lines of "Keywords: XXX" 20 Lines of "CSNet: XXX" 19 Lines of "cc: XXX" 18 Lines of "uucp: XXX" 16 Lines of "CSNET: XXX" 12 Lines of "Cc: XXX" 11 Lines of "In-Real-Life: XXX" 10 Lines of "Sender: XXX" 7 Lines of "Resent-To: XXX" 7 Lines of "Resent-From: XXX" 7 Lines of "Resent-Date: XXX" 7 Lines of "DARPA: XXX" jim@tycho PS. Please don't take this TOO seriously :-) -------