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From: Joe Greco <jgreco@solaria.sol.net>
Message-Id: <199701092014.OAA07665@solaria.sol.net>
Subject: Re: CCD questions (news server)
To: joe@via.net (Joe McGuckin)
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 97 14:14:57 CST
Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199701090831.AAA04364@monk.via.net> from "Joe McGuckin" at Jan 9, 97 00:31:32 am
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> I just switched over our news machine from a tired old Sun SS2 (with Weitek
> upgrade) to a 133Mhz pentium with 12G of Barracudas ccd'd together,
> 
> I arbitrarily set the interleave to 64. Is there a good method to derive 
> the optimal interleave factor?

Yes - search the hackers mailing list archive for usenet, news, ccd,
interleave, etc. and you will find one of my several essays on the subject.

You are killing your performance with such a low number.

> I'm using a flags value of zero. How can I expect flag values of CCDF_SWAP
> and CCDF_UNIFORM to affect performance?

Don't know.

> My initial experiences are very positive. The machine seems to process articles
> about three to five times faster than the Sun with a load factor that never 
> goes above .45 (so far, only one of our incoming feeds has switched over to the 
> new machine).
> 
> I'm very impressed. Especially if you consider that no performance tuning of
> the system or INN has been done yet. I'm not using MMAP yet because there 
> seems to be some question as to how well it works for INN.
> 
> Has anyone ever put together multiple machine 'news farms'? I'd like to 
> find out what's been done so far.

I am running a pair of feeder machines here, 'newspump.sol.net' and the
brand new 'newsfeeds.sol.net'.  newspump is a P133/256MB/3 SCSI/17 drive
box, newsfeeds is a PPro200/256MB/5 SCSI/24 drive box.

Between the two of them, they handle 22 peer feeds and LOTS of news.

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/342-4847