At 08:09 AM 3/23/01 -0500, you wrote:
>I've never really understood this properly so maybe the good folks in
>here can enlighten me. Most binary group articles are stored using
>UUEncode which as I understand it uses 30% more space than the
>original binary file. Some newer news readers now post in a MIME
>format and I'm not sure how efficient that method is.
>
>Being a simple man :-) I would have thought that there would be a more
>efficient way to encode and store binary data by now - or if not,
>someone on the news server end would have written something to decode
>inefficient binary attachments and recode them to something else, or
>back into their original binary format to save disk space on the
>server.
>
>For example, if MIME was more efficient than UUEncode, then as a
>completed UUEncoded message comes in, the server decodes it and
>re-encodes it in MIME format. (This would work real well with the
>multi-part feature of DNews as you'd never see the article until it
>was all there).
>Or, if neither of those two are very efficient formats you could
>easily (I think) get the news server to decode attachments to an FTP
>server and change the message body to point to the new location of the
>file - (you'd need to watch for duplicate filenames or look at a files
>checksum etc to avoid overwriting files).
>
>I would have thought that given the huge estimated increase in the
>volume of binary traffic over news, this would be an important area to
>improve on.. rather than just getting bigger disks and fatter pipes.
>
>Just my early morning ramblings :-)
Well the main problem is any encoding/decoding is likely to over work the
processor
as volumes increase, when you are processing 3mbytes per second 'any'
playing with the data
can impact performance on last years hardware. (And as that doubles or
tripples it will
equally kill this years processors :-)
And often there are bigger savings to be had with things like the multi
part filter which
saves you storing all those useless broken parts.
You can simply run your spool onto a compressed drive, if you have the
spare processing
power it will achieve the same 30% space reduction.
However, having said that, what you say makes some sense and
decoding/encoding between
binary and mime/uuencoding is probably simple enough it could be done on
the fly.
Anyway, we will definitely put these suggestions on the the wish list and
think about them in more
detail for the next major version.
ChrisP.
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