🚀 go-pugleaf

 In article <821405905snz@xciv.org>
  Paul Civati <paul@xciv.org> said:-

>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.


I understand this but maybe its time for demon to take the view of 
most businesses who offer services if they cant take any more work on 
because they are too busy at that time then they tell the customer 
that they are too busy and put there name down on a waiting list if 
they still want to buy that service when there is enough resources.

>> 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.

Imho demon should set a limit for customer to modem ratio and not go 
over this ratio even if it means turning people away.

>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.

I understand what you are talking about here it would be very hard to 
make this sort of system work what about using one disk array 
connected to lots of different news servers? Scsi arbitration found on 
most new drives is meant for multiple machines to connect to the same 
drive, the only problem I see here is the disks might not be able to 
keep up with reading and writing of news articles but if some raid 
type system was used im sure it would be fast enough.


I dont know how feasable this one is but it sounds workable to me, 
what about if demon installed lots of newservers and did the same 
thing with these as with customer to modem connections make certain 
lots of modems always use one newserver on each machine which handles 
a bank of modems news.demon.co.uk could be aliased to a different 
newserver this way the customer could leave there software configured 
for news.demon.co.uk so no changes would be needed to configs and it 
should be workable so that customers get a fast and decent connection 
to a news server all of the time (or at least most of 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*.

So its well within the capacity of a disk array to handle this much 
data.

>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.

Well I just hope they sort this lark out fast or I for one wont be 
staying here for too much longer.

>> 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. :(

the Ascend terminals don't like USR 28.8k modems all the people I know 
with them (both sportsters and couriers) get dropped connections from 
them after 10 mins or so online.
>
>> 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. ;)

But most of us still pay BT for the bad connections Im sure about 1/4 
of what I spent on phoneing demon last quarter was from bad connection 
calls or droped carriers once connected type calls, and that is a lot 
of money.

>
>> 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?

Most of them havn't been around for 3 years :-)

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

I hope so or else they may loose 50,000 customers over 3 years because 
of them.


>-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/
>


__


                     <     Nicholas Flintham    >
                    >   Nick@Flinny.demon.co.uk  <
                    <    N.P.Flintham@unn.ac.uk  >
                     >     Falcon 030/4/1180    <