On Sat, Aug 25, 2007 at 08:44:45PM -0400, William Herrin wrote:
NNTP is similar to BGP in that every message must spread to every node. Usenet scaled up beyond what anyone thought it could. Sort of. Its not exactly fast and enough messages are lost that someone had to go invent "par2".
I think the context of (the other) David's question was wether or not there need to be any changes in technology. In that context, I don't think NNTP is a good analogy to prove the point that no changes in technology are necessary. NNTP acheived its ends in large part due to a protocol update for 'streaming' feeds - the CHECK and TAKETHIS commands to de-synchronize sender and receiver (supplanting 'IHAVE' and 'SENDME') allowed servers to fill the socket buffer and make full use of TCP large-window and selective-ACK. I do not think I overstate the importance of this change to call it an 'NNTP rewrite'; it literally reversed NNTP's core design. There was at least one company that sold commercial NNTP software - and provided a catalyst that caused most other software to reflect upon itself and redesign core processes. Virtually all software changed significantly (and there's some debate wether it was for the better). But the biggest part of NNTP's survival, I think, were the behind the scenes news mega hubs - expensive machines with a lot of memory bandwidth, solid state disks, and fat network connections, taking and giving feeds to anyone who would ask. Some (most I think) were operated at a loss - purely to support the network. -- Ash bugud-gul durbatuluk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul. -- David W. Hankins "If you don't do it right the first time, Software Engineer you'll just have to do it again." Internet Systems Consortium, Inc. -- Jack T. Hankins