On Thu, 6 Feb 1992 22:19:27 EST Stan Horwitz said:
>
>Since mail-via=dist2  is enough  to handle  the load from  lists with  lots of
>non-local subscribers, isn't the concept of  peering now obsolete?  The list I
There are those like Michael Gettes(5&6) who would argue that peering
is obsolete, and he puts forth a convincing argument.  Having worked
at maintaining highly peered lists, I for the most part agree with
his statements.  Dist2 and the highly connected backbone of bitnet make
this less needed.  The difficulty of maintaining peers is non-trivia.
However, the CPU resources needed to maintain a large list should also
be a consideration.  I haven't measured where it currently is, but there
is a knee in the response time curve for adding or deleting users
from lists, when the number of subscribers is measures in the 1,000s.
I haven't checked recently, but we were one of the first sites to
run lists with over 1,000, then 2,000, then 3,000 and now over 4,000
subscribers.  Netmonth(no, there hasn't been a recent issue) currently
has over 4,400 subscribers.  The time to add or delete a subscriber
can easily be measured with an egg timer.  Don't get me wrong,
Eric did a lot of work improving it.  I has gotten better, but if your
Listserv is running full tilt,  a large list can make it worse.
 
Also relavent(except to mrg), is that with peers, the access to the
filelist/archives is more localized with peers, assuming that all
peers treat the archives/filelist the same.
/ahw