IBM RS/6000 unsuitable for news

[Tom Fitzgerald]

> In article <1F7k22w164w at halcyon.uucp> halcyon!ralphs at seattleu.edu (Ralph Sims) writes:
> >In an earlier post I mentioned that the average MS-DOS filesize for news
> >articles appeared to be ~3K.  Using a 4K blocksize would be fairly efficient
> >under that condition.  

nraoaoc at nmt.edu (NRAO Array Operations Center) writes:
> Not if you have hundreds of tiny articles and a few giant ones which skew the
> average.

Which is indeed the case.  Most articles are less than 1536 bytes.  From
a snapshot of the news here:

size	      # articles	cumulative
----------    ----------	----------
1-512:		  832		  832
513-1024:	 8551		 9383
1025-1536:	10069		19452
1537-2048:	 6139		25591
2049-2560:	 3301		28892
2561-3072:	 1699		30591
3073-3584:	 1052		31643
3585-4096:	  734		32377
4097-4608:	  468		32845
4609-5120:	  316		33161
5121-5632:	  192		33353
5633-infinite:	 1513		34866

mean:	2603 bytes
median: 1300-1400 bytes, or somewhere around there

A 4K block size wastes about 40% of the disk.  Take my word for it, that's
what we're running here.

It depends a LOT on the flavor of the newsfeed, too.  Articles in talk.*,
rec.* and soc.* have a smaller median size than articles in comp.* and
news.*.  Moderated groups have larger articles than non-moderated groups.

---
Tom Fitzgerald   Wang Labs        fitz at wang.com
1-508-967-5278   Lowell MA, USA   ...!uunet!wang!fitz