Newsgroups- Message sizes?

[JEDI]

if a message has 300k lines, how many megs is that? The reason i ask is that the file i downloaded ended up to be 14megs in my download directory, but it took 2 hrs at 56k. i usually can download 40megs in 2 hrs at 56k .

so does that mean a message w/300k lines is ~40megs in size? (i'm using forte agent 1.91).

If not, is there a rule of thumb to estimate how much time it'll take to download a msg based on # of lines?

THX

 

[JEDI]

bump

 

[kranky]

We have to assume how long a "line" is, so let's pick 80 characters.

300k * 80 = 24 megs. But each line can vary in length. From your example, (300k lines = 14 megs), each line averaged 46 characters.

I'm not convinced that the line counts in the newsreader are always accurate anyway.

 

[royaldank]

You're paying for a lot of overhead when grabbing from newsgroups. Unless it's yEnc, your messages have to be altered to meet some old standard for newsgroups. That adds a lot of overhead, sometime 40-60% over what you are downloading. That is bad because you have to pay for downloading that with whatever your newsgroup d/l limit is, and because it takes time. But, it varies slightly, especially with yEnc starting to take over.

The jury is still out on yenc, but basically, it reduces much of the overhead. Sometimes more than others, but you'll notice a difference. They are generally much smaller and save some time.

So, I don't think there is a foolproof way to tell how big the message is...but I could be wrong.

 

[JEDI]

ah..cool..so assuming 80 char/line and 300k lines, then it'll takes 24megs (1hr) to download at 56k.

when my newsreader decodes that msg, it's 14megs. thus 70% overhead

hm..no compression for the download since it's just a plain text msg??

 

[JEDI]

hm..just tried yEnc..WOW!

80k line message = 6.4megs. what ended up in my directory was a 9.5meg file.

wow! NICE, compared to the previous thing of a 24meg download to get a 14meg file.