🚀 go-pugleaf

> Henry,  would you please post some of the statistics involved in the storm?
> What are the top groups, and how much do they contribute to the volume of
> news?

For the benefit of those who don't get/read mod.newslists, here is seismo's
latest list of top groups.  This doesn't include the Canadian groups, since
seismo is a US site, but the Canadian groups (with the possible exception
of can.politics :-)) are not that big anyway.  This list covers only the
last two weeks, but is probably reasonably representative of recent times.
It's also probably fairly representative of the situation at most places,
since most traffic is net-wide.

-----
         No. of        $ Cost  % of  Cumulative
Rank  Kbytes Articles per Site Total  % of Total  Group (Articles/contributor)
   1  1012.3      50     31.63 10.9%    10.9%     net.sources.mac (1.9)
   2   479.3     397     14.98  5.2%    16.1%     net.singles (2.7)
   3   446.3      65     13.95  4.8%    20.9%     net.sources (1.5)
   4   408.3     287     12.76  4.4%    25.3%     net.women (2.4)
   5   320.6     134     10.02  3.5%    28.7%     net.origins (3.4)
   6   293.0     217      9.16  3.2%    31.9%     net.politics (2.3)
   7   273.0     303      8.53  2.9%    34.8%     net.music (2.8)
   8   259.1     442      8.10  2.8%    37.6%     net.sf-lovers (3.7)
   9   249.2      19      7.79  2.7%    40.3%     net.sources.games (1.7)
  10   248.1     247      7.75  2.7%    42.9%     net.movies (2.0)
  11   231.3     239      7.23  2.5%    45.4%     net.flame (1.8)
  12   204.8     120      6.40  2.2%    47.6%     net.unix (2.1)
  13   197.0      89      6.16  2.1%    49.8%     net.religion.christian (2.8)
  14   188.0     241      5.88  2.0%    51.8%     net.lang.c (2.1)
  15   174.7     179      5.46  1.9%    53.7%     net.micro.pc (1.5)
  16   174.1      52      5.44  1.9%    55.5%     net.religion (2.3)
  17   173.7      67      5.43  1.9%    57.4%     net.philosophy (2.7)
  18   160.1     211      5.00  1.7%    59.1%     net.unix-wizards (1.7)
  19   156.5     272      4.89  1.7%    60.8%     net.jokes (1.6)
  20   154.8     146      4.84  1.7%    62.5%     net.micro.mac (1.5)
  21   146.0      74      4.56  1.6%    64.1%     net.politics.theory (3.5)
  22   141.1     169      4.41  1.5%    65.6%     net.physics (3.1)
  23   138.9     174      4.34  1.5%    67.1%     net.micro (2.5)
  24   128.8     100      4.02  1.4%    68.5%     net.news (2.2)
  25   121.5     161      3.80  1.3%    69.8%     net.consumers (1.5)

$ Cost is the cost of sending it over a 1200 baud, long distance, phone link
presuming $0.15 per minute and 800 baud effective throughput. 
-----

> What are the costs, in CPU usage and in money spent on maintaining news?  

As for CPU and disk usage, news is running well in excess of a megabyte
per day.  You can make your own guesses as to how much effort is needed
to process that much swill each and every day.

News maintenance per se is not a big cost item, but it's a noticeable
commitment on the part of the sysadmins involved.  Links fail or have
troubles, recurrences of the line-eater bug have to be traced, that
sort of thing.  It's just a little cut that won't stop bleeding.  If 90%
of the traffic were interesting technical material, it wouldn't be so
irritating.
-- 
				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
				{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry