Re: About to unsubcribe

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On Wed, 26 Nov 2008, Charles Seeger wrote:

> +------ Patrick Vervoorn wrote (Wed, 26-Nov-2008, 10:44 +0100):
> | I've noticed what you mentioned before, but didn't find it a big nuisance.
> | A simple press of Ctrl-r when you're at the end, puts you back at the
> | beginning.
>
> I'll give that a try, but I'm wanting to go back to the middle, where
> I had hit tab to read a selected thread, rather than to the beginning.
> Matt Ackeret suggested this might be a feature rather than a bug,
> in which case trn may still have a valid index to the previous page in
> the thread selector.  If so, there may be a command to make use of that.
> Until now I've been remembering the percentage displayed at the bottom
> of the thread selector and using "<" to move back to that vicinity.
> All things considered, this certainly is a minor nuisance compared to
> memory leaks, crashes and non-ascii character support.

Interesting to see in what ways different people read the newsgroups. In 
my case, I first do a scan of the overview-pages, selecting what I (think 
I) want to read. At the end, I press 'X' to junk all other stuff, and 
start reading. Scrolling by 'space' when things are interesting, when a 
sub-thread gets boring, I press ',', when the whole thread has progressed 
beyond recovery, I press 'k'. Trn does the rest.

It's a rather rare occurance that I select a single thread, read it, then 
go back to the article overview (usually a marked thread to which I 
contributed), but I can understand why the behaviour you're describing is 
a nuisance in that case.

> | As for my memory-related problems, I do not encounter these when I read
> | 'regular' text-groups, even when they're pretty big and/or have a rather
> | big retention. I do encounter this when skimming through binary groups,
> | with up to several hundred k's of article-overviews being pulled in.
>
> Since I don't read any binary groups, that probably is the difference.
> But, some text groups that I do read have 500-1000 articles per day, and
> I sometimes go several days to a week before accessing their overviews.
> But I don't think I have ever reached 50k of actual new articles (as
> opposed to article numbers).  I don't run the server, so I'm not up on
> the retention periods, but 100k spooled articles may be an upper bound
> for the text groups that I'm reading/skimming.

With the amount of flow in the binary groups, the textnews groups are 
nothing more than a 'drop in the bucket' compared to it. I know of usenet 
servers who do not actually expire their textnews groups, since the needed 
storage is trivial compared to a days worth of binaries.

Be aware something like alt.binaries.x or alt.binaries.boneless has 
several million articles flowing through it per day.

> | So it's possible the usenet-flow wasn't available in april 2001 when
> | test76 was released, so it's never been tested with these amounts of
> | articles...?
>
> I haven't looked at the relevant statistics, but I suspect that Usenet
> traffic hasn't increased all that much since the turn of the millennia,
> certainly not compared to other Internet traffic.  OTOH, the binary
> groups may differ significantly.  Still, increased traffic (or greater
> retention--bigger disks!) might be enough to hit one threshold or another.

Binary newsgroup are still growing; while many people are opposed to using 
UseNet for binaries, it is at the very least a pretty useful (but perhaps 
not efficient) way of 'broadcasting' binaries. According to the Wiki page, 
total UseNet traffic was 3.8 TB/day in april 2008. It should be well over 
4 TB / day by now I suppose.

Over in news.software.nntp, a discussion raged about a commercial provider 
(IIRC it was Giganews) going to 64-bit article numbers. Reason: the huge 
amount of articles flowing to the aforementioned 'dump-groups; 
(alt.binaries.x/boneless/etc) is causing them to run out of the 32-bit 
space. This would probably break trn in a big way (and a lot of other 
clients too).

All of course due to the binaries; text-news flow is nowhere near that 
volume to need updates/fixes like that.

> Best,
> Chuck

Best regards, Patrick.


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