Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!yale.edu!cmcl2!panix!alexis
From: alexis@panix.uucp (Alexis Rosen)
Subject: Speed tradeoffs in C-news?
Message-ID: <1991Jun28.105916.806@panix.uucp>
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 91 10:59:16 GMT
Organization: PANIX - Public Access Unix Systems of NY

Currently we are getting almost a thousand articles per day in marginal
newsgroups that we're not interested in. We let them fall into junk, and
expire in 3 days. This is OK, but I'm curious about a speed issue.

What takes more time, for a large feed (~20MB/day)?
1) Process 2-3 MB of junk articles per day
2) Change the "ME" sys file line to trash these hierarchies. We'd basically
   have to add about a dozen "!hierarchy," to the groups field.

Option 2 would save time on writing junk articles to disk, but would take
up more time for every article by increasing the time to compare each
article's group header to the sys file line.

I understand that the answer would depend entirely on the reletive speeds of
our CPU and disks. Figure that our performance profile probably isn't vastly
different from a Sun 3/60 with a decent local disk.

Thanks,
---
Alexis Rosen
Owner/Sysadmin, PANIX Public Access Unix, NY
alexis@panix.com
{cmcl2,apple}!panix!alexis
