Abstract
Usenet is the name of a world wide network of servers for group
communication between people. From 1979 and onwards, it has seen a
near exponential growth in the amount of data transported, which has
been a strain on bandwidth and storage. There has been a wide range
of academic research with focus on the WWW, but Usenet has been
neglected. Instead, Usenet's evolution has been dominated by
practical solutions.
This thesis describes the history of Usenet in a growth perspective,
and introduces methods for collection and analysis of statistical
data for testing the usefulness of various caching strategies. A
set of different caching strategies are proposed and examined in
light of bandwidth and storage demands as well as user perceived
performance.
I have shown that advanced caching methods for news offers relief
for reading servers' storage and bandwidth capacity by exploiting
usage patterns for fetching or pre\-fetching articles the users may
want to read, but it will not solve the problem of near exponential
growth nor the problems of Usenet's backbone peers.