How fast is the “backbone”?
The Usenet backbone is extremely fast and also very resilient. In terms of speed, the majority of the top 150 machines on the Freenix list are separated by no more than 10 to 15 seconds. The very fastest machines (at least the top 25, possibly more) are most often in sync to under 3 to 5 seconds. A busy site with many peers could easily see the same article offered 20 times within the first second; and a fast Cyclone server can turn around an article (time from being first offered to time first offering) in under 250ms.
