"Stephen J. Wilcox" <steve@opaltelecom.co.uk> writes: [...]
The question is, and apologies if I am behind the times, I'm not an expert on news... how is it possible to reduce bandwidth used occupied by news:
We had pretty good luck (modulo some crashing software) with caching news servers, instead of traditional news feeds. We had a master cache in the center of our network, and satellite caches on the edge which connected back to the master. We found that the vast majority of groups never got read, and the ones that did were read consistently, so it was possible to prefetch those groups during off-hours. We convinced a commercial newsfeed to charge us by bandwidth instead of simultaneous readers, had pretty good service (more points of failure, so more downtime, but still pretty good...), and saved a lot of bandwidth, disk space, engineer time, and money. If we had time to get the bugs worked out (the software crashed multiple times per day, then our ISP was purchased), it would have been a perfect system. -------ScottG.