A bit too much success

During a weekday, the 9 DCC servers that answer to dcc.dcc-servers.net,
dcc2.dcc-servers.net, dcc3.dcc-servers.net, dcc4.dcc-servers.net,
and dcc5.dcc-servers.net handle almost 11 million requests.  It
would be nice to limit the load on each of the public servers to
about 1 M requests/day which is less than the current load if it
were uniformly distributed.  (For various reasons, that load is
not uniformly distributed.)

It would be nice to add a few more public servers to that group.  The
main requirement is for a machine with better access to the Internet
than 128 Kbit/sec (unlike one of the current servers), at least
768 MByte of RAM (more is nice), and a similar amount of free disk
space.  There are also some hassles with running an extra shell script
or two that does a frequent FTP of the common blacklist of naughty
DCC clients and perhaps generating a private/secret web page or two.
(The common one is a list of the fewer than 0.2% of clients that
generate more than 20% of the load.)

Note that if there is any monetary profit in running a public server,
I would love to hear about it, because I don't know of one.

The public DCC servers should only be dealing with mail systems
that handle fewer than 50,000-150,000 mail messages/day.

This is in no sense a crisis.  I figure the current 9 could handle
20M requests/day or more, but now seems like a good time to plan ahead.


Vernon Schryver    vjs@rhyolite.com