I have  been starting  to monitor  the console  logs of  my LISTSERV  (which I
usually trash out) to  try to determine why it has  suddenly started eating 4h
of CPU time a  week, instead of its normal average of 2h.  In the last hour of
wall-clock time, it has swallowed up 10 minutes of CPU time. If it keeps going
at this  rate, it  will have eaten  4h of  CPU in  one day. If  I look  at the
console  log, I  see two  request  for short  commands from  local users,  one
BIG-LAN distribution,  and 37 INFO-VAX  distributions. This has  generated 407
outbound files, just for the french people on  the list. Now I know why we are
recently experiencing traffic problems on the international lines.
 
I have peeked at some of the files  and, although I'm not a VAX expert and can
therefore not  judge their contents,  it seemed  like this list  is addressing
just any  kind of problem closely  or remotely related to  VAXes. I definitely
think  that  it  should  either  be split  into  several  sub-list  addressing
different topic, or changed into a moderated list (volunteers?). Personally, I
can't see how I'll be able to  justify doubling the CPU allowance for LISTSERV
just so that it may convey INFO-VAX  stuff to other nodes, especially since we
have no VAX here and are not interested in this list. More generally, (13 more
files have showed up  since I started typing this letter), I  can't see how we
can justify spending so much bandwidth for this one list. At the very least, I
would like to recommend holding this list during prime time.
 
  Eric