🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3219c285.98781980@news.unifr.ch>, Robert Ribnitz wrote:

>I also know that Switch has some serious problems with capacity (only
>400kb/s towards the US.. 200 ppl surfing at 2 kb/s for about 70 % of
>switzerland (some private providers like EUNET have their own lines).)

Please accept that the usual unit in network talk is the bit,
as in kilobits/second, abbreviated kb/s or kbps. Also in use is
kilobytes/second, kB/s (capital B). Switch's transatlantic line is
3.072 Mbit/s, or roughly 400 kB/s, or 32.4 Gigabytes per day (see
http://www.switch.ch/switch/lan/stat/).  Usenet traffic on a rather
busy day is in the order of 2 Gigabytes per day. Go figure.

Usenet news traffic would account for about 6% of those 3 Mbit/s if
Switch actually got its news thru that line -- they don't. The map on
http://www.switch.ch/switch/netnews/switchintfeeds.html, and also a
perusal of Path:-Headers show that most articles come into Switch's
servers from european feeds.

So if the Switch news servers have a problem, it is most probably
not raw network bandwidth. A more severe problem is the sheer number
of articles, which is currently in the order of 1-3 Articles per
second, averaged over a day. Current news server software can cope
with 5-10 articles per second without much fine-tuning -- it has to
write the article to disk, append a line to the overview file, the
history file, and the history-dbz file. Disks, unfortunately, have
not kept up with faster CPUs and faster network links.


-- 
  Andi Karrer, Institute for Electronics, ETH Zuerich, Switzerland
  karrer@ife.ee.ethz.ch    
  - Rien ne va, und schon gar nicht plus.