From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Jul 7 18:45:37 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id SAA21017 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 18:45:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: from implode.root.com (implode.root.com [198.145.90.17]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA21011 for ; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 18:45:34 -0700 (PDT) Received: from implode.root.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by implode.root.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id SAA02910; Mon, 7 Jul 1997 18:47:01 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <199707080147.SAA02910@implode.root.com> To: Thomas David Rivers cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Why news expiration is sooo slowww with 2.2.x. In-reply-to: Your message of "Mon, 07 Jul 1997 07:35:43 EDT." <199707071135.HAA01419@lakes.water.net> From: David Greenman Reply-To: dg@root.com Date: Mon, 07 Jul 1997 18:47:01 -0700 Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > I should have mentioned, this is a 386-33 (with an Intel 387) and >only 8megs of RAM. Prior to 2.2.1, it took only a few hours to expire; >now it takes many days.... Examining swapinfo during this process >indicates swap is mostly free, so I don't believe my constrained memory >is the problem (I'm not even swapping...) Certainly my CPU is >slow, but it wasn't any faster prior to version 2.2.1.. :-) You might be hitting a knee on available buffers vs. directory size. Usenet has been a cesspool of cancel messages recently and I was seeing the control.cancel newsgroup > 10MB in size (per day!) recently. I had to set up a special cronjob just to delete all the crap every hour. Anyway, a directory that large (and any others) will interact very poorly when the buffer pool is real small - such as the case on a machine with only 8MB of main memory. You might try tinkering with the calculation of "nbuf" in /sys/i386/i386/machdep.c. -DG David Greenman Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project