[mythtv-users] Mooting architecture for a DataDirect replacement - paging Brad Templeton to the thread

Jay R. Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Fri Jun 22 19:36:31 UTC 2007


On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 03:32:49PM -0400, Dan Ritter wrote:
> > That said, I've never run INN or any other newsserver; my Usenet
> > experience, although more than 15 years in duration, has been strictly
> > as a consumer, not a provider. I am not worried about learning care
> > and upkeep for a newsserver; however, I can't guarantee that my setup,
> > as sophisticated as it is, will be sufficient to handle the kind of
> > traffic necessary.
> 
> Let's suppose that you were going to be a central node for the US. How
> much disk space and bandwidth? A quick estimate, all numbers made up.
> 
> A channel has 2 programs per hour all day long: 48 programs per
> day. You'll store 14 days, or 672 programs, times 3000 channels
> in the US. Just over 2 million entries. Each day 150,000 entries
> get changed. That about 1.7 a second. We'll say 2 per second.
> 
> A program is a start time, a finish time, a channel id, a
> program number, a title, a subtitle, a description, an episode
> number, yadda yadda yadda. About a kilobyte, all told. So,
> 16Kbits/second on average, storage of 150MB. Let's say 300MB,
> we're inefficient. Even if an XML representation triples it,
> which it shouldn't, everyone has enough space to store all the
> program information they will need.

Nice math.  My envelope was dirty...

> People on dialup won't want to use this. People on cheaper DSL
> lines will only be interested in being clients. But pretty much
> anyone else can be at least a small server node, with 2 or 3
> local neighbors just pulling down their regional groups and 2 or
> 3 big nodes feeding them. A big node should have more bandwidth,
> but doesn't need much else.

Gee... that sounds just like... Usenet *used* to be.

Can we put the Myth discussions newsgroups on that feed, too?  :-)

> NNTP is pretty efficient -- it's one of those old-style
> telnettable protocols that a human can learn to speak in a few
> minutes. Less than 5% overhead on the line.

Yay, telnet.

> Usenet was deep magic when a T1 and 10 GBs storage made you a
> decent regional ISP. Now? Not so much, unless you want to carry
> all the traffic in the world. Especially, not carrying binaries
> reduces the traffic by a factor of, oh, a hundred. Maybe more, I
> haven't checked lately.

Thank ghod you're here, Dan; we'd have had to invent you.  :-)

Come to think of it, Brad Templeton is here, too, and he probably knows
more about Usenet than ell of us put together.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com                     '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274


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