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\title{UROP Proposal}
\author{Greg Hudson}
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Network news, or netnews, is an international network providing
information to millions of users worldwide.  Over thirty thousand
articles per day flow through netnews.

Currently, the Student Information Processing Board, a voluntary
student organization, maintains the primary news server for the MIT
community.  This is a high-volume, highly visible service, handling
over four thousand newsreading sessions per day.

Because of the high load, SIPB has been experiencing load problems
with the current news hardware.  Information Systems and SIPB are
currently alleviating load problems using more expensive hardware, but
as demand grows, this approach will not be feasible.

My project will be to modify the news software to improve efficiency.
This is divided into two phases.

Phase 1 is a modification to the news server's connection-handling
program.  Currently, the connection-handling program runs once for
every connection, which wastes a lot of memory and causes unnecessary
disk activity.  We can eliminate this bottleneck by modifying the
program to handle a variable number of connections, so that there are
many fewer processes involved.  This is a fairly simple modification,
and we can probably put it into production within a few months.

Phase 2 is a rewrite of the news server's connection-handling facility
which can operate as a single process.  This kind of program should be
able to get very good performance on operating systems which support
threads, although it may require tuning.

I may also explore the possibility of a rewrite of the entire news
system, but this is not currently part of my UROP.

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