> 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. Agreed. > 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. An idea I had was to have all message-id retrieval handled by an external process/thread which was memory/bandwidth limited, and all access queued and serialized (being careful no to trash the disk buffers in the process). This way - it will work for one of two articles, but for many articles it will bog down and become unusable. -Chris
