bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) (07/03/89)
From article <1884@papaya.bbn.com>, by rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz): > The next topic was running NNTPXMIT. Most people run it every 30 to 60 > minutes, a few run it every one to 10 minutes, and Scott Bradner at > Harvard runs it continuously. **Care to post your script that does this, > Scott?** After pleading from Erik Fair, most people agreed to run it more > often. **Please run NNTPXMIT at least every 10 minutes.** What is the reason for this? To reduce average propagation time? To increase size of already-large log files? Paul DuBois dubois@primate.wisc.edu
wisner@mica.Berkeley.EDU (Bill Wisner) (07/04/89)
bin@primate.wisc.edu (Brain in Neutral) writes: >What is the reason for this? To reduce average propagation time? To >increase size of already-large log files? To reduce average propagation time. Unless you're running on floppy disks or never prune your log files, their size should not be an issue. When Ed Vielmetti was at the U of Michigan's computing center, he had mailrus and sharkey running nntpxmit from cron every minute. This may or may not still be the case; Ed's now with UM's math department. Bill Wisner wisner@mica.berkeley.edu ucbvax!mica!wisner I'm not the NRA either.
fair@Apple.COM (Erik E. Fair) (07/04/89)
Running nntpsend often is entirely an exercise in making news flow more quickly. If everyone is running with what we recommended in the original NNTP release (every 10 minutes), then it takes an hour to go six hops. I'd like to see it take six minutes (i.e. run nntpsend every minute). If you read Rick Adams' UUNET statistics posted in news.lists every two weeks, I'm looking to push the initial wave of traffic to the first hour, and spread it out more evenly. This isn't a strictly statistical goal either; netnews is fast becoming the computer conferecing system of the Internet, but it is still not as fast as Internet mail. Fortunately, with your help, this can be fixed. Currently, ucbvax and apple are both running 1 minute nntpsend (I just took that first field in the /usr/lib/crontab file and turned it into a star "*"). I know that other backbone sites are running faster than 10 minutes too. It hasn't put much of a load on the systems because we're moving just as many bytes as before - the load is just spread out more evenly, rather than spiking every 10 minutes... Erik E. Fair apple!fair fair@apple.com P.S. let's move the discussion out of comp.org.usenix to news.software.nntp.