Scaling

[Nicholas Geovanis]

On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Joe St Sauver wrote:

> >Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2000 17:10:05 -0500 (EST)
> >From: "Forrest J. Cavalier III" <mibsoft at epix.net>
> >Subject: Scaling
> >To: inn-workers at isc.org
> 
> So... I'm not sure that bandwidth is really the issue here,
> at least not for large universities. 

I'd like to second this opinion. Total Usenet news traffic
here is a drop in the bucket of both network capacity and actual
traffic. 

I'll grant you that Northwestern isn't really "large" as universities go
(15K students total). But for comparison, we do video and audio streaming
of campus events, classwork, the radio station; host LOADS of externally
accessible web servers providing everything from astronomical images to
digitised recordings of Supreme Court sessions and every little byte that
every student would like the world to see about themselves; class
registration is entirely online and web-based; all library electronic
card-catalog browsing and maintenance is TCP/IP-based....Crafty students
have (tried to) run small commercial ISPs out of their dorm rooms.

In relative terms, even if we did carry EVERY single binary posted (which
we don't), it just wouldn't come close to total network usage.

Where my constraint lies is in handling my local clients with good
response and long-ish expiration periods from a single box which the
management is comfortable in paying for (feeds are separate of course).
Big networks are (relatively) easy to fund today because they are seen as
part of the necessary infrastructure.

> Regards,
> 
> Joe

* Nick Geovanis
| IT Computing Svcs           Let's have a war,
| Northwestern Univ           We can jack-up the Dow-Jones.
| n-geovanis at nwu.edu             - Fear
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