🚀 go-pugleaf

I recently did a small test to check the quality of Achilles's and
Storm's Usenet feeds. I went to Deja, http://www.deja.com/, and prepared
a sample group of 265 posts available there. Then I checked how many of
these posts had been received by Achilles's and Storm's news servers.

The results I calculated are as follows:

Achilles: 67 %
Storm:    83 %

In other words, Achilles's news server had received 67 % of the Usenet
posts in my sample, while Storm's news server had received 83 %.

My test wasn't designed to check how frequently the news servers were
down, but it's clear that Achilles's server was down more often than
Storm's. Storm's server was apparently down once during the period of
the testing; if I had ignored this failure, Storm would have scored 
94 %.

In addition, I calculated how many of the 2345 "official" groups in the
"Big Eight" hierarchies were carried by each system.

I calculated that Achilles carried all the official groups except 169,
and in addition carried 111 "bogus" groups. Storm carried all the
official groups except 3, and in addition carried 390 "bogus" groups.

I believe that a properly configured system should carry all the
official groups. In addition, a system shouldn't carry any bogus groups,
although this is a less serious fault than failing to carry official
groups.

Please note that I made no attempt to test the propagation of posts in
the alt.* hierarchy, since there's no "official" list of valid groups in
that hierarchy.

I intend to make more tests like this in the future. If you represent an
ISP and would like me to add you to future tests, please contact me.

-- 
Yves Bellefeuille <yan@storm.ca>, Ottawa, Canada
Francais / English / Esperanto
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