rhorn@infinet.UUCP (Rob Horn) (06/22/88)
Since binaries are usually send as uuencoded, bin-hex'ed, ... files I decided to adjust the traffic values to reflect the different compresion efficiencies for these files. Based on a couple dozen Mac and PC binaries (either StuffIt'd or ARC'd) that were batched and encoded I found an average compression of 20%. For ordinary text, the same batching compresses by 65%. Since the uunet traffic numbers do not separate binaries from others, I used Brian Reids traffic size numbers. The resulting traffic percentages for compressed articles is: Comp. (w/o binaries) 29% Rec. 25% Binaries 22% soc. 8 talk. 7 misc. 4 sci. 3 alt. 3 SO... when faced with traffic volume problems, eliminating binaries is an easy step with a big impact. We did it about two months ago when our phone bills were becoming too large. (We're only a backup newsfeed for neighbors so the net will probably never notice.)-- Rob Horn UUCP: ...harvard!adelie!infinet!rhorn ...ulowell!infinet!rhorn, ..decvax!infinet!rhorn Snail: Infinet, 40 High St., North Andover, MA