Re: Where to find accurate number of Usenet Servers?

On 10/10/21 7:02 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> If the pope shits in the woods and there is no one around to smell it, 
> does it still have an odor?

Almost certainly.  The pope's digestive system isn't going to do 
anything differently based on if there are people around or not.

> That top1000 site, when we first started to feed our stats into it, I 
> was under the impression it was for speed of articles posted. So if one 
> system got an article posted from somewhere in the world in 3 seconds 
> and another system in 10 seconds, the first system got a higher rank.

That's contrary to my understanding.

My understanding is that Top1000 is about the number / volume of 
articles, and decidedly not about speed.

> That made sense back in the days UUCP was still common (or even bnews 
> or cnews) because some articles could take hours/days/weeks to show up.

I haven't seen anything about stats to Top1000 being about /time/.

There's no time tracking as messages flow through Usenet servers like 
there are in email Received: headers.  Even if there were, you have the 
inconsistency of clocks to content with.

Thankfully, the number of messages that pass through a given server is 
independent of time.

> Now with most systems on nntp, not really sure what the point is 
> measuring all that anymore.

I still see plenty of point in measuring the number / volume of 
articles.  If for nothing else, choosing better connected systems to 
peer with.

> I remember a while back (late 90's, early 2000's?) there was one system 
> that constantly was in the top 5 if not in the #1 position and they 
> were running a pc using Windows something. When asked how they did it, 
> the answer was fairly simple, they had 100's of feeds and a shitload 
> of ram.

And that makes perfect sense, a very large number of peers would 
probably mean that it would get messages to the largest number of peers 
sooner.  Thus the peer is more likely to have not seen a given message 
and accept it from the extremely well peered server.

> So that top1000 site, besides being handy to see who is left, doesn't 
> seem to have any real world use anymore.

I disagree.  It's an indication of the number / volume of articles. 
Time is incidental / after the fact.



-- 
Grant. . . .
unix || die