Date: Tue, 5 Nov 1996 11:29:12 -0600 (CST) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: richardc@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU (Veggy Vinny) Cc: michaelv@MindBender.serv.net, mark@quickweb.com, terry@lambert.org, imp@village.org, jmb@freefall.freebsd.org, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: /usr/obj size Message-ID: <199611051729.LAA06955@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.PTX.3.95.961104224355.13095w-100000@soda.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU> from "Veggy Vinny" at Nov 4, 96 10:45:45 pm
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> On the topic of hard disks, what are the minimum requirements to > run a FreeBSD machine as a news server with a full news feed in terms of > CPU, memory, HD Storage and does it have to be on several HD instead of > multiple large capacity drives such as 9 gig drives? Vince, IMHO it depends on what you are going to do with the machine. Are you going to have lots of readers? Lots of inbound and/or outbound feeds? (Remember that many sites these days feed via "innfeed", and this counts as multiple feeds)... It also depends on how long you want to retain news, how many groups are in your active file (how "full" the feed is), whether or not you want to support other things on the system, etc. If you are going to have one user reading news and have a single inbound feed, sorted, held for half a week, and nothing else, you might be able to do it on a fairly skimpy system. My idea of fairly skimpy would be 486DX/133, 64MB RAM (maybe 48MB), a fast disk for root/var/newslib, and a big disk for spool. You might be able to get away with less memory by using C-News. My standard cuff calculation formula for RAM is: 1MB * active readers + 2MB * number of feeds + 8MB for system + 2 * sizeof(history.pag) I consider this to be a minimum. News will make very good use of as much memory as you can give it. One of my clients considered it to be an excessive maximum and learned a very expensive lesson when their news service sucked. For a CPU, I have not found a significant need to go beyond a P133. 'newspump.sol.net' is a P133, and is a dedicated feeds machine. It ranks #25 in the Freenix ratings this month. A large client has 100-150 nnrp sessions reading news on their P133 boxes, with CPU to spare. This game isn't really about CPU, it is more about memory, caching, and I/O. Besides, CPU is cheap. Chipset is ultimately important. You WILL not be successful if you buy a cruddy motherboard/chipset. Buy Triton-II. I recommend the ASUS P/I-P55T2P4, or P/E-P55T2P4D (see http://www.asus.com.tw). I recommend buying hardware from Rod Grimes, I have never been disappointed by his services and support. <sales@gndrsh.aac.dev.com>. Do not compromise on your I/O system. News is extremely taxing on a machine's disks. Buy multiple SCSI busses. It is much better to buy three $70 ASUS SC-200 NCR-810 controllers than one $220 AHA-2940 SCSI controller (but if you want to spend $660 on three AHA-2940's, that is not a bad solution either). Buy lots of disks. Stripe them with CCD. The reader machines noted above have 12 disks each: ---------------- ---------------- ---------------- | sd0 root | | sd10 var | | sd20 newslib | | 2G ST32550N | | 2G ST32550N | | CCD 1G 31055N| |--------------| |--------------| |--------------| | sd1 newslib | | sd11 nov | | sd21 nov | | CCD 1G 31055N| | CCD 1G 31055N| | CCD 1G 31055N| |--------------| |--------------| |--------------| | sd2 news | | sd12 news | | sd22 alt | | CCD 2G 32550N| | CCD 2G 32550N| | CCD 2G 32550N| |--------------| |--------------| |--------------| | sd3 alt | | sd13 binaries| | sd23 binaries| | CCD 2G 32550N| | CCD 4G 15150N| | CCD 4G 15150N| ---------------- ---------------- ---------------- Notice I stripe across controllers... also note the rants I have posted in the past on CCD stripe sizes. Use large ones except for the newslib disk. With 150 readers, this is DAMN BUSY... Rule #1) People always try to cheap out on news servers. Rule #2) They fail. Remember those rules and you have a chance of designing a good news service... ... JG
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