Re: Fundamental Question?

[kevin@elvis.wicat.com]

>2.  USENET propogation is not that slow;  Between well connected sites
>(IE, just about any Internet host that isn't swamped for other reasons
>like Netcom frequently is) I haven't seen a larger lag than a few hours.

Consider the incoming directory on my local news host:

--
jlc:/usr/spool/news/in.coming$ ls -l
total 401
-rw-r--r--   1 news     news       172237 Feb  1 16:08 21705-000000.t
drwxr-xr-x   2 news     news         1024 Jan 31 13:43 bad/
-rw-r--r--   1 news     news        79792 Jan 27 12:35 nntp.a00606
-rw-r--r--   1 news     news       130025 Feb  1 16:09 nntp.a21731
drwxr-xr-x   2 news     news        21504 Jan 21 12:57 save/
-rwxr-xr-x   1 news     news          194 Nov 30 14:22 unz*
jlc:/usr/spool/news/in.coming$ grep Date 21705-000000.t | more
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 18:28:21 GMT
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 18:34:30 GMT
Date: 30 Jan 1995 11:03:14 -0800
Date: 30 Jan 95 13:25:19 +0200
Date: 30 Jan 1995 13:35:59 -0500
Date: 30 Jan 95 17:59:27 GMT
Date: 30 Jan 1995 13:25:40 -0500
Date: 27 Jan 1995 14:11:51 -0600
Date: 27 Jan 1995 14:50:32 -0500
--

The majority of incoming messages are two days old (this was on Feb 1 at
16:10, GMT -7); the worst instance in this particular batch was six days
old (posted from a backwater site in Sweden).

Before you object that this is obviously a poorly-connected site, we're
on a leased 56K line two hops from the backbone (we're fed by BYU, who
is in turn fed by the University of Utah, one of the original four
internet sites and as well fed as you get). Our server is keeping up
with the incoming news. I suspect this is a pretty typical scenario.

--
    Kevin