A recent note to the list indicated there are over 1000 SOL readers out
there. Large mailing lists tend to consume huge amounts of resources on the
list machine. I've noticed a tendency toward a bit more, shall we say,
latency in the distribution of the SOL lately. While it's not an addiction
("I can quit at any time!"), I do begin to get a little edgy if my SOL fix
isn't there in the morning...
So, anybody for a little parallel processing?
It seems to me that we could do a couple different things to offload
autox.team.net or triumph.cs.utah.edu or whatever machine currently does all
the work. Here are some ideas:
1. Split the british-cars mailing list proper roughly speaking by
Internet domain. For instance, some simple sleuthing indicates there
are 31 SOL digest recipients in the aol.com domain and another 22 in
the hp.com domain. Reflectors in those domains (or standing in for
those domains) would lessen the load on triumph (or autox, whatever).
2. Split roughly by region of the globe, e.g., have a mail reflector for
the UK, another for Oz, another for the rest of Europe, maybe four
for the US (East, Southeast, West, and Midwest, just like the NCAA
Basketball regions...), etc.
3. Split by the type of brit-car owned. I realize Roger Garnett would
get several copies of the digest. I guess he'd have to pick a single
car that is his primary Lucas demon. :-)
4. Spplit by the condition of your "primary" LBC. Would everybody wind
up in category 1? Or category 5 (completely disassembled)? Just
kidding, folks. :-)
5. Arbitrarily assign folks to one of eight or ten SOL subgroups.
Any of these schemes would offload autox or triumph at some extra
administrative overhead. At the least, each subgroup, however formulated,
would require its own maintainer and Mark Bradakis, as the SOL
extraordinaire, would have to sort incoming requests to add or delete
somehow. Would it be worth the effort? I'll leave that to smarter minds to
decide. If a decision is made to do something, I'll be happy to help in any
way I can.
Ob brit car content: I started the TR250 Saturday. Needed a jump start and a
few tugs on the fuel pump lever. Spring must have finally arrived, even
though the crocuses and daffodils are having a hard time poking up through
the couple feet of snow in the backyard.
Skip (montanaro@crd.ge.com)
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