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