On Mon, 16 Nov 1992 13:50:00 EST Alexander Dupuy
<[log in to unmask]> said:
>10,000 recipients just seems like a bit too much for a mailing list.
>Even if you could split the INTERBIT load up a bit, it would still be a
>tremendous waste of resources to be sending all those copies of mail.
>Netnews was designed for exactly these sorts of hugely popular
>discussion groups, and is very efficient at getting copies of many
>messages to thousands of subscribers. With 10,000 subscribers, there
>should be no difficulty getting enough support to create the newsgroup.
I'm afraid I don't follow the logic. Apart from the fact that the average
distribution takes one order of magnitude less resources on BITNET than
on the Internet (and that's quoting an *average* reduction factor - for a
list of this size the difference would be even bigger), usenet is not
going to save any bandwidth if there are only 10,000 people interested in
the information, as the postings will be sent to a lot more hosts than it
would with the list. Furthermore the simplified procedures for getting a
new newsgroup are at best a pain in the chairwarmer, and I won't even
begin to mention the traditional ones. This list was apparently set up to
distribute announcement/digest type messages, rather than to solicit
discussions. The only problem is that the Internet recipients all fall on
the same host, and that can be a problem if that machine is loaded or
poorly connected. I wouldn't know - this is for Jim to judge.
>it should be possible to split the discussion group into three parts
>gatewayed together, with 2000 subscribers to a BITNET peered LISTSERV,
>2000 subscribers to an Internet peered Unix LISTSERV, and the remaining
>6500 subscribed to a Usenet newsgroup.
May I ask what adding a unix so-called-LISTSERV Internet list would buy
you? I realize I am sounding dense, but I simply don't understand what
there is to gain from splitting a perfectly working list into two
separate lists using different, incompatible software and then attempting
to somehow reconcile the whole mess, especially if postings are
infrequent. The LISTSERV backbone happily delivers 4-6 millions of
messages a day and few sites ever complain about resulting CPU or network
load. The only issue is what happens to private mail on the poor machine
which suddenly gets 8,500 recipients to handle, and if it is a problem it
should be easy to peer the list.
Eric
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