(e-mail address removed)>, (e-mail address removed)
says...
[ ... ]
Jerry, just a question to clear a doubt of mine: did you receive
Pascal's and my replies to this thread? I'm noticing that sometimes
people posts replies which contain already pointed out things, and
that's strange. Maybe Google Groups is not sending out replies to the
other servers immediately as expected, hence the delay noticed by fdm
and your reply... I don't know.
Welcome to NNTP! I received 38 new messages at once, including one
from Pascal and two from you (one directly to the OP, and one to
Pascal) at exactly the same time I received the post to which I'm
following up.
A server doesn't normally send out replies immediately. Rather, it
has some other servers it connects to on some sort of schedule, and
when it connects it sends any new posts it has, and collects any new
posts the other has. Ultimately, it's just about like when a
newsreader connects to a server, sending any new posts it has (i.e.
whatever I've written) and collecting any new posts on that server.
If we connected to the same server, the delay between one of us
posting an article and somebody else seeing that article would
normally be expected to be pretty short -- typically in the range of
a few milliseconds up to a few seconds or so. When we're connected to
separate servers, however, the delay can be substantially longer.
Looking at the Path header, I see that your post traveled through
about 15 servers to get from you to me, so it's not a great surprise
that it takes a while.
The other thing to keep in mind is that there's no real central
management of any of this -- it's pretty much up to individual site
operators to decide what other server(s) they connect and exchange
news with. The protocol is fairly robust in tracking messages so you
don't see duplicates if a single post arrives by different routes
(barring a mis-configured server munging things up). There's far
less, however, to guarantee that a post will get to every server --
for that, it's pretty much up to individual sites to connect to
enough other servers to provide redundancy so when any given path
dies, there will probably be at least one other that works.