[news.software.nntp] one inews call per article, really?

lamy@ai.toronto.edu (Jean-Francois Lamy) (05/02/88)

We run C news around here, and queue batches in a "printer" queue in order to
serialize news unbatching.  C news' relaynews program (nee rnews) gobbles up a
batch without forking processes for each article and bringing the machine to
its knees.  We would like to install NNTP, but since the POST commands spawns
an inews per article we would end up wasting all the advantages of having
relaynews around (we currently use UUCP over TCP).

We are thinking of doing things around those lines: fix NNTP to create a batch
for each NNTP connection, and queue those.  That way there is always a single
relaynews running, we don't get umpteen processes all waiting for a lock while
filling up our swap space.  This sounds cheaper than putting more memory on
the machine.

Comments?

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy
AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4