Re: Efficiency of requesting by message-id vs group+number

On 2024-08-22, Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

Jon Ribbens <jon+usenet@unequivocal.eu> writes:

I've no idea. I haven't looked since the 1990s, when it was very rarely,
if ever, blocked.

>
Hm, I'm not sure about that.  Blocking NEWNEWS in INN goes back a long
time.  The old implementation did history text file searches, IIRC, and
was rather inefficient for single groups if the server had a lot of
traffic.  Maybe I'm misremembering, but I don't think I am; I'm pretty
sure I disabled NEWNEWS on the servers I was running in the late 1990s.

It may perhaps be that you were not working at a UK dial-up ISP? :-)

At the time we sold an Internet connectivity package for Acorn RISC
computers, that included an off-line mail/newsreader whereby you
dialled up, fetched the new articles for your groups, then disconnected
(calls were charged by the minute, so you did not want to remain online
while reading/replying).

This obviously worked by using NEWNEWS, and I don't recall many
complaints about it not working, although looking back I may dimly
recollect one or two.

(I may perhaps be the only person in the world who's written both
a news server and a graphical web browser in assembly language.)

It may have helped that the UK ISP marked at the time was dominated
by Demon Internet, who pioneered the dial-up market, and as far as
I recall they used their own custom news server, which certainly
did support NEWNEWS efficiently enough for their purposes.

The current implementation is quite efficient if the user specifies a
single newsgroup, which is a common use case of NEWNEWS.  If they specify
a wildmat that matches a bunch of groups, it's still fairly bad.
NEWNEWS * has to search the overview of every group on the server for
articles in the date range, so if you have a lot of groups, that is going
to be painful.

I would expect that our software used NEWNEWS with specific group names.
It was a non-technical GUI interface so I don't think people will have
been interacting with it using patterns rather than ticking groups shown
on the screen.