On Tue, 2 Jun 1998, Chris Wedgwood wrote: > On Sun, May 31, 1998 at 03:19:39PM +1200, Alan Brown wrote: > > > Suck has a command line switch for retrieving by article number > > rather than Message-ID. > > > > If I catch people retrieving by Message-ID rather than article > > number, they usually get LARTed and told to use article numbers. > > A bit harsh? > > Getting a message via Message-ID is allowed and can be very useful, its the > only thing that approaches a global identifying for messages that people who > use different news feed can use as a common reference. True, but that's no excuse for 20,000 retrievals by message ID, which is the kind of thing one sees happening. If you want to get message-IDs in a group on a remote server to see what's worth retrieving or not, you're better off grabbing Xover information for the group and using that. It's considerably faster than hundreds of "header <article-number>" too. Retieval by message ID is ok for one or two articles, but it doesn't scale well. Anyone using it as a method of news sucking deserves to be LARTed for wantonly wasting CPU on the news server. Apart from the CPU issues, a machine which can't cope with having the entire history database loaded up will basically be unusable for all the other readers on it, so message-ID retrieval turns into a denial of service attack. AB
