sanders@cs.ubc.ca (Michael Sanderson) (11/03/90)
I am curious about what people have done regarding the "simultaneous" acceptance of a particular message from multiple NNTP feeds in a C News environment. By "simultaneous" I mean receiving IHAVEs for the same message in different instances of a nntpd process before processing the batches. For example, nntpd A receives an IHAVE <123@foo.bar>, sends an OK, gets the article and continues receiving more articles (doesn't process the batch yet). nntpd B (from a different site feed) receives an IHAVE <123@foo.bar>, sends an OK since <123@foo.bar> isn't found in the history files), and get the article as well. nntpd A starts up relaynews which processes article <123@foo.bar> nntpd B starts up relaynews which junks article <123@foo.bar> since it is now in the history file. I realize that, in the end, there won't be multiple copies of the message in the news spool directory since relaynews junks duplicates, so this isn't all that big a deal. However, if you have multiple NNTP feeds which are well connected, a significant portion of the articles received may be junked. NNTP helps to avoid this when running B News, but we seem to have lost that advantage under C News. I don't have numbers for you, since I haven't switched to C News on our main host (yet), partly due to this concern. I am wondering if anyone has suggestions on how to prevent the reception of the article by nntpd. If I recall correctly, this topic came up when C News first appeared, but was swept into the bit bucket when no one came up with a clean solution. Any takers now? -- Michael Sanderson sanders@cs.ubc.ca {alberta, uunet, uw-beaver}!ubc-cs!sanders
geoff@athena.mit.edu (Geoff Collyer) (11/07/90)
I've been testing a new nntpd on several machines at U of Toronto for the last few months. It almost completely eliminates transmission of duplicates and gets articles into the news system quickly. I want to tune it a little more before sending it to Stan Barber for inclusion in the official NNTP release.