On Sun, 3 Feb 2002, Marco d'Itri wrote:
The major drawback of that protocol is that it limits articles size to 64KB, so it does not reduce binary traffic, which is the largest part of a newsfeed.
In which case you just modify the protocol (or roll your own) to have articles spread across multiple packets. It's not that hard and our guys did this and I expect it's been done (at least) half a dozen times by other people. Anyway multicasting thing doesn't solve the problem really, you still have to transport 30Mb/s (plus) from outside you network to inside it, put it onto a (relativly expensive) server and give it to the customers. The economics of the whole exercise are very interesting once you get past disccussion ( worth doing for anybody ) and picture groups (worth doing for all but the smallest ISP). Comitting to a good supply for multi-part binary groups probally should involve sitting down with one of the company accountants (if you only have one accountant then your company is probally to small). -- Simon Lyall. | Newsmaster | Work: simon.lyall@ihug.co.nz Senior Network/System Admin | Postmaster | Home: simon@darkmere.gen.nz ihug, Auckland, NZ | Asst Doorman | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz