The growth of the Usenet as depicted in the figure has
implications on the requirements for the machine's hardware running
the news server software, the operating system and the attached
network.
Since articles are distributed via copying at least
400KBit/s
of network bandwidth have to be dedicated
for the transmission of the news articles permanently. This value does
not include the overhead generated by NNTP's communication message.
Hence the actual network bandwidth required for a full news feed is
even higher.
The machine running the news server needs powerful hardware. Fast CPUs are required since large news database indexes have to be generated. Big, fast and high quality hard-drives have to be used because many articles have to be stored, many accesses to articles have to be fulfilled, and hence considerable strain is produced on the hard disk. These demands increase with the steady growth of the Usenet.
Since each article is stored in its own file a better filesystem is required, because more articles have to be stored. Many filesystems have the problem that only a fixed number of files may be stored. Hence the maximum number of files may be reached although free disk space is available.
The operating system has to support a fast file-locking mechanism (to ensure mutual exclusion), otherwise it is possible that a news server cannot catch up a backlog of the news feed. We will explain this in section 3.1 in more detail.
An extension to NNTP might reduce these requirements on the network bandwidth and the computer hardware. In some situations a news server can be replaced by another server which does not store the whole news spool. In the following sections we will illustrate a few problem scenarios where an alternative solution or an extension to NNTP might provide the same service, but using fewer resources.
