IDD Status
The IDD currently has 121 sites participating. With the release of the LDM, version 5, data reception has been more reliable when the internet is stable. However, growth of use of the internet has outstripped the growth in capacity and this has adversely affected the IDD performance. We have seen cyclic congestion, usually during mid-day, of the internet, leading to increases in the latencies of the IDD products, which in turn cause lost data. While we have done what we can to pressure the internet service providers to improve the situation, there has been no real improvement to date. We have been working to devise strategies to overcome the internet problems, but there is only so much that can be done. While these measures have helped, overall performance is still not where we would like it to be. Another IDD issue is that of site participation as relay nodes. The IDD is critically short of relays. Up until now, we have found sites to fill this role, and everyone requesting connection to the IDD has been accommodated. The problem is that there simply are no more sites either willing, or capable of being a relay. Reasons range from sites that are OS/2 only, unwilling to take on the responsibility, and insufficient bandwidth or technical expertise. In addition, we have lost several existing relay sites due to various reasons.We will be changing the way that the IDD performance is measured. Given that the internet problems are affecting data reception, one of the measures that we have implemented is to suggest to sites that they only ask for the data that the need, rather than ask for everything. However, when this happens the current method of measuring data reception becomes invalid. We have no way of knowing what percentage of the data was received. Thus, we have sites reporting less than 100% reception, when this is really not the case.
To address this situation, we plan to move to measurement of product latencies on a per feed basis. This is a better measure of performance, as when latencies remain under a predetermined amount (currently 1 hour) we can be sure that all of the data is being received. Conversely, latencies of an hour or more indicate that data is now being lost. Latencies will also provide us with a clearer picture of overall internet performace in general.
LDM Status
Version 5 of the LDM was released at the end of February. There were significant enhancements to the release which were noted in the release announcement. We have also announced a sunset date (August 15, 1996) for support of LDM, version 4, protocols. This will allow us to implement further features that were not supported by the older protocols. One new piece of development for the LDM is the implementation of a new ldmadmin process. This is being implemented in Java and has the following features: