free collaborative tools for low BW and losy connections

Sun Mar 29 14:56:27 UTC 2020

On Sun, Mar 29, 2020 at 03:01:04PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> Bj??rn Mork wrote on 29/03/2020 13:44:
> >How is nntp non-scalable?
> 
> because it uses flooding and can't guarantee reliable message 
> distribution, particularly at higher traffic levels.

That's so hideously wrong.  It's like claiming web forums don't
work because IP packet delivery isn't reliable.

Usenet message delivery at higher levels works just fine, except that
on the public backbone, it is generally implemented as "best effort"
rather than a concerted effort to deliver reliably.

The concept of flooding isn't problematic by itself.  If you wanted to
implement a collaborative system, you could easily run a private
hierarchy and run a separate feed for it, which you could then monitor
for backlogs or issues.  You do not need to dump your local traffic on
the public Usenet.  This can happily coexist alongside public traffic
on your server.  It is easy to make it 100% reliable if that is a goal.

> The fact that it ended up having to implement TAKETHIS is only one 
> indication of what a truly awful protocol it is.

No, the fact that it ended up having to implement TAKETHIS is a nod to
the problem of RTT.

> Once again in simpler terms:
> 
> > How is nntp non-scalable?
> [...]
> > Binaries broke USENET.  That has little to do with nntp.
> 
> If it had been scalable, it could have scaled to handling the binary groups.

It did and has.  The large scale binaries sites are still doing a 
great job of propagating binaries with very close to 100% reliability.

I was there.  I'm the maintainer of Diablo.  It's fair to say I had a 
large influence on this issue as it was Diablo's distributed backend
capability that really instigated retention competition, and a number
of optimizations that I made helped make it practical.

The problem for smaller sites is simply the immense traffic volume. 
If you want to carry binaries, you need double digits Gbps.  If you
filter them out, the load is actually quite trivial.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way
through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that
democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'"-Asimov