Overhead??

[James B. Houser]

        I was wondering how much overhead is  involved  in  a  bboard.
Since  I  already  had a SED script to remove most of the junk it only
took a few minutes work with sort and whatever  to  generate  a  rough
tally.  My  source material was a good sized chunk of UNIX-WIZARDS and
INFO-UNIX message text.

  The text file was 18572 lines or 1464 (V6) blocks
  After striping out overhead it had 10118 lines or 1027 (V6) blocks
  The lines of overhead added up to 8454 lines or 437 (V6) blocks

This means that overhead was 45% by lines and 30%  by  size.  This  is
much  less  than  I  would  have expected.  I tried to be very liberal
about what constituted real text and  so  this  is  probably  a  lower
bound.  A  interesting  question  would  be what happens when you then
consider the the lower level overhead due to IP and whatever.  It  was
not  my  intent  to  be  critical  of  the internet but instead simple
curiosity that sparked this.

The actual line item count follows.  While there may be some  question
as  to what overhead this is what I chose.  One thing I did notice was
some variety in header labels, for example In-reply-to: and  In-Reply-
To:. used interchangably.


3365 Blank Lines
1336 Lines of "Repeated Messages of the "> XXX" type
515  Lines of "From XXX"
498  Lines of "Date: XXX"
497  Lines of "Subject: XXX"
494  Lines of "To: XXX"
371  Lines of "-----------------------------"
364  Lines of "Received: XXX"
204  Lines of "Re: XXX"
128  Lines of "Return-Path"
127  Lines of  Miscelaneous Junk Overhead
121  Lines of "XXX ;000000000000"
85   Lines of "UUCP: XXX"
38   Lines of "Reply-To: XXX"
37   Lines of "INFO-UNIX Digest XXX"
37   Lines of "End of INFO-UNIX Digest"
35   Lines of "Message-ID: XXX"
35   Lines of "ARPA: XXX"
24   Lines of "Nf-ID: XXX"
24   Lines of "Nf-From: XXX"
22   Lines of "Keywords: XXX"
20   Lines of "CSNet:  XXX"
19   Lines of "cc: XXX"
18   Lines of "uucp: XXX"
16   Lines of "CSNET: XXX"
12   Lines of "Cc: XXX"
11   Lines of "In-Real-Life: XXX"
10   Lines of "Sender: XXX"
7    Lines of "Resent-To:   XXX"
7    Lines of "Resent-From: XXX"
7    Lines of "Resent-Date: XXX"
7    Lines of "DARPA: XXX"


			jim at tycho

PS. Please don't take this TOO seriously :-)

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