leaf site

[obs.] Before pervasive TCP/IP, this term was used of a machine that merely originated and read Usenet news or mail, and did not relay any third-party traffic. It was often uttered in a critical tone; when the ratio of leaf sites to backbone, rib, and other relay sites got too high, the network tended to develop bottlenecks. Compare {backbone site}. Now that traffic patterns depend more on the distribution of routers than of host machines this term has largely fallen out of use.

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