🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <821402380_OASIS_@wuss.demon.co.uk>
           Tracy@wuss.demon.co.uk "Tracy Taylor" writes:

> Firstly, the 'line busy' problem. An employee of Demon has made it plain in this
> group already that Demon only sell connections. I say to this that they are
> selling far too many connections for the capabilities of their system. If I

Some areas of the service are straining as Demon try and keep up with the
ever increasing number of customers using the service.  Demon has grown at a
very fast rate over the last couple of years making it difficult to keep up.

> main reasons I wanted onto the 'net in the first place. So I am being denied one
> out of two of the main services which I pay for. DEMON! Buy some more modems &
> get another newsserver!

Modems and new lines *are* on the way, only a few days ago some new lines
were added I believe.

As for buying another news server, this isn't as easy as it sounds.  Sure we
(Demon) could do that, but that means customers would have to manually
switch between several different machines to find a less loaded one.

The solution is to implement a custom solution of several news machines
looking like they are one machine, 'news.demon.co.uk'.

This is difficult to implement, seeing as each machine would have to have
its newsbase in sync with the other machines.  This kind of system has never
been implemented by anyone else AFAIK so we are having to code custom
software to do it.

On average, our full news feed brings in 1.3Gb or 140,000 new articles every
day from the other ISP's we peer with.  From our news servers customers
download over 60Gb of news per *day*.

Progress is being made though, only today I started building a new news
machine which will hopefully become part of this 'pool' of news machines,
though as I said, the software to handle this 'pool of machines' is
something we're still working on.

> It would appear that the system has developed another nasty wee trick. When I
> eventually get onto the Newsserver, it waits until I have got my first few
> pieces of news & then drops carrier. WHY? Is there a problem with news? If so,
> why aren't we told about this?

This doesn't sound like a problem with the news server to me, I would think
that it's just an unlucky conincidence. :(

> If I didn't know any better, I'd swear blind that Demon & BT are in cahoots to
> try to push phone bills as high as possible. Well, there are other companies who

That would explain why Demon has most of its modem lines now provided by
Energis and Mercury. ;)

> offer local calls in my area now. Some of them even offer cheaper monthly rates
> for what _appears_ to be the same service. Hang on, though, isn't that what I'm
> complaining about...?

How many of them have gained a customer base of 50,000+ users in 3 years?

> I would be interested to know if other users experience the same sort of
> problems with Demon. Please write & let me know. Mind you, I may never see your
> replies....

Demon are well aware of the problems and are constantly battling to improve
the service.

-Paul- (aka paul@demon.net but posting from home)

-- 
Paul Civati             Home: paul@xciv.org, paul@xciv.demon.co.uk
FYI it's 'sivarty' ;-)  Play: http://www.xciv.org/, http://www.domino.org/
"I'll spell potato any fu*king way I want." - Dan Quayle (Bill Hicks)