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 The list I There are those like Michael Gettes(5&6) who would argue that peering is obsolete, and he puts forth a convincing argument.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