I remember building news.Skynet.be up into the Top 100 with some very careful use of Diablo and splitting all my feeds along binary bucket sizes, so that I'd have like eight or ten simultaneous streams going to each peer, and usually the individual buckets stayed roughly the same amount full.

And Diablo had some cool techniques that amounted to offering a news article to all the peers as soon as the unique news article was offered to it, but before the actual body of that unique news article had been delivered. Then you could go rapidly deliver it to all your peers.

So, odds were that if you had a diverse feed, you'd see more news articles come into your server and then successfully flow out of your server to your other Top 100 peers, than anyone else.

I spent months tweaking those newsfeed bucket sizes and peer lists, and I would peer with anyone I could. And I actively searched for new peers that seemed to have a diverse set of news articles that I wouldn't have otherwise seen.

Our peers in Belgium had a love/hate relationship with us over this. They loved us because that meant we had a very fresh feed to give them. But they hated us because it was a "local" network hop across the Belgian exchanges with their high-priced Belgian WAN lines instead of coming across their much higher bandwidth and much lower cost international T-3 connections.

We also had a satellite feed for news articles, which helped us fill in the content over 64KB in size, because that was our break over for our non-binary/binary news feeds.

Then Belgacom decided to bring Skynet back inside the parent company and all the people who had a clue left like rats leaving a sinking ship.