Acbosgd.170
net.news
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!mhtsa!ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark
Thu Dec 3 09:28:48 1981
Re: watmath.1128: user numbers
Well, whether trt prefers it or not, B netnews has a .newsrc for each user,
rather than a .uindex file. The big advantage here is that no matter what
horrible thing goes wrong when an article comes in, your .newsrc does not
get clobbered. It's also faster when news comes in, since nobody has to
go updating the whole .uindex or checking /etc/passwd. Finally, it allows
for someone to have read news out of order, keeping certain articles around
until later. It probably does take up more disk space - each user has his
own file, and each file is bigger than the one liner he had in .uindex.
It is probably common for a .newsrc to be bigger than 512 bytes, for people
who read lots of newsgroups. On the other hand, people who never read news
don't take up any disk space or time at all. And, of course, there is no
problem at all for systems with randomly allocated uids, since nobody ever
looks at all the uids at once.
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