From: Henk Stokhorst (Tha@wxs.nl)
Date: Wed Mar 01 2000 - 08:22:09 CST
L.S.,
The infrastructure of the usenet is overloaded, what remedies can be
taken?
First of all Usenet started even before the days of acoustic modems with
1200 baud downstream and 300 baud upstream were showed in the
homecomputer user groups 2 decades ago. Today you can blow a 650 Mb CD
image over the net faster than the time needed to get a cup of tea from
the kitchen. The mirroring of newsgroupservers just don't make sense
anymore. Six newsservers could supply the world with messages without
causing congestion. OK, that's an estimate, but for sure it is
contraproductive to have half the ISP's run their own server.
A maillist can be started with a minimum of about a dozen people. The
maxiumum it can handle is a few hundred people. A newsgroup can be
started if you have about that many people, a few hundred. A newsgroup
can handle no more than say a couple of thousand readers. If there are
more participants, too many articles get posted. Splitting up by
specialisation is not always the right answer. You can easily have two
identical newsgroups NOT connected by newsfeeds.
Therefore it is my opinion that newsservers should not exchange data
between each other anymore. Neither should ISP's run newsservers for
their customers only. A number of interested parties will run
newsservers for the public, and they should not exchange newsfeeds.
After an amount of time a number of popular newsservers will have
formed, some specialised, some general. The total amount of traffic will
be lower and user participation higher. For sure some people will miss
each others although they share the very same interest in a subject, but
the amount of people getting lost will lower.
I can understand some people will want to take some time before getting
used to the idea.
Yours on the Net,
Henk Stokhorst