"Stephen" == Stephen Sprunk <stephen@sprunk.org> writes:
[NNTP servers] Stephen> OTOH, it might be doable if you didn't carry the Stephen> alt.binaries groups; those account for well over 90% of the Stephen> bytes on usenet today, More like 99.9%, and an even larger proportion if you filter out binaries from other groups too. Broadly speaking the daily volume is something like 2.8TB/day for the whole feed, or somewhere in the ballpark of 1GB/day for the non-binaries feed. Stephen> Another option is to run a caching-only news server, Stephen> provided you can find a willing upstream. If you're talking about binaries, the fact is that Usenet simply does not cache well. You'll have to use many terabytes of disk to get even a modest hit-rate, and the performance benefits will be slight. For text, there's no point in running a caching server rather than a real one, since the incoming bandwidth for text is so small (couple of hundred kbits) and the storage requirements so modest (one 36GB spool disk will hold a month's traffic). -- Andrew, Supernews http://www.supernews.com -- individual and corporate NNTP services