When it comes to transmitting a back log, all of the gains of the buffer cache go out the window, and we are back to having retrieve articles off disk again. I would expect the performance to be identical. I have not tested this theory. It is very difficult to test this. You need two batches of articles of approximately the same composition, but with different message IDs.
Life is too short.
So far it is a toss up between innxmit and NNTPlink . I examined the code of innxmit and saw it took great pains to cope if people did that. I have not examined the code of NNTPlink to see if it does the same. That is no slur on NNTPlink , I just think innxmit is a better tool for this job. If anyone has hard evidence one way or the other about this, do let me know.