[Pan-devel] Re: A proposal for multiserver.

[Duncan]

Matt Eagleson posted <address@hidden>, excerpted below, on
Mon, 06 Jun 2005 12:38:24 -0700:

> [I]t might be valuable to include a priority value with server
> definitions so the user can have some influence over which server Pan
> will use when many have a particular article.  In this way the user can
> make sure the fastest servers are preferred, et cetera.

This was probably included in "et cetera", but I while faster server is
important, I expect more commonly evaluated would be ISP bundled vs
paid/premium vs paid/bulk-rate servers.  I'd guess this would be the most
common multi-server same-group scenario, and even where folks have several
at the same pay-level, a premium paid source that they want to use /only/
when a post doesn't exist elsewhere (that means get it elsewhere if
possible even if the connection to the paid server is free and the others
are busy) would be rather common.

See, the thing about speed is that if the same set of articles are tasked
to be downloaded from multiple servers, the /fast/ server will /naturally/
get higher priority and download most of the messages, because it will be
going thru the messages faster there than the other servers, so after the
initial set or two of individual posts, anyway, will already be ahead of
the others and downloading as many posts from the faster server as the
faster server has available.  Thus, "priority" isn't really needed in that
case, because it just naturally happens as one would expect.

OTOH, paid/dedicated/premium news servers will likely be relatively fast,
but also are likely to be more expensive per gigabyte, so the idea is to
download as little as possible from them, using them only as a backup
server in case a post isn't available from the
low-cost/bundled/free/flat-rate server.  Thus, priority would be NEEDED
here, to COUNTER the /natural/ tendency to download more from the faster
server, because the posts are processed faster on it so given the chance,
it will grab most of the posts from it, costing the user gobs of bandwidth
charges!  In this case we do NOT want the faster server to be used, unless
it is the ONLY server with the message available.  This is really the only
reason priorities should be needed, because as explained above, if it's
only for faster servers, the priority will take care of itself.

That's how I see it, anyway, and what I've seen others saying in the
groups, as well.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html