Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:35:21 +0200 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: Kevin Monceaux <Kevin@RawFedDogs.net> Cc: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org>, FreeBSD Questions E-Mail List <FreeBSD-Questions@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Returning User With Filesystem/Memory Tuning Questions Message-ID: <8763m04fdi.fsf@kobe.laptop> In-Reply-To: <alpine.LNX.2.00.0812032223290.29569@Blaidd-Drwg.RawFedDogs.net> (Kevin Monceaux's message of "Wed, 3 Dec 2008 22:44:29 -0600 (CST)") References: <alpine.LNX.2.00.0812031230460.29569@Blaidd-Drwg.RawFedDogs.net> <20081203202155.GA84629@slackbox.xs4all.nl> <alpine.LNX.2.00.0812031659260.29569@Blaidd-Drwg.RawFedDogs.net> <87abbciqgr.fsf@kobe.laptop> <alpine.LNX.2.00.0812032223290.29569@Blaidd-Drwg.RawFedDogs.net>
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On Wed, 3 Dec 2008 22:44:29 -0600 (CST), Kevin Monceaux <Kevin@RawFedDogs.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Dec 2008, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
>
>> For what it's worth, I've been reading newsgroups with more than 5000
>> messages in Gnus, a newsreader that runs inside GNU Emacs, and its
>> memory usage has *never* reached 512 MB,
>
> I doubt I'd have a problem with newsgroups that small with either tin
> or pan. How well does Gnus handle groups with 1,000,000 to 2,000,000+
> messages? My ISP dropped it's NNTP service a while back and I ended
> up signing up with GigaNews. They have 240 day retention for binary
> groups and 1,990 day retention for text groups. So, many of the group
> archives on their servers are huge. Granted I don't need to retrieve
> all the headers for a particular group, but it's not unusual for me to
> be browsing a group with a header count in the five to six digit
> range.
Ouch. That's a really big group size. I have only opened groups with
Gnus that contain upwards of 120,000 messages (my full email archive
since around 2001). When I try to open the particular message archive,
Gnus takes about 7-8 seconds to generate the full group summary, and the
memory usage of Emacs jumps to about 150 MB.
I haven't tried opening a *remote* group with more than a million
messages, but I suspect this is going to take a while :-)
> I finally gave up on tin a while back and switched to pan. It seems
> to be less of a memory hog with larger groups than tin was. I prefer
> TUI based programs over GUI based programs, but I think pan is worth
> putting up with the GUI interface.
Heh, I know what you mean. Most of the time the only GUI programs that
run around here are Firefox for Javascript-heavy web pages and Evince or
XPDF for reading PDF documents.
> Well, I guess I'll probably need at least a few if I go with ZFS this
> time around.
It may be worth running an AMD64 version of FreeBSD if you plan to use
ZFS for heavy-duty tasks. I am currently without a network connection,
but I will seek the FreeBSD Wiki page about ZFS tuning, and will post a
followup to this post.
I installed FreeBSD/amd64 on my laptop to test ZFS a few weeks ago, and
with the tuning mentioned in the Wiki it was rock-stable for every day
work. The test installations I used were two:
* One with GELI encryption for the full disk and ZFS running on top of
the encrypted device.
* One with ZFS only, using most of the disk (and a small 2 GB /boot
partition for bootstrapping into a ZFS-root filesystem).
Rink Spinger has posted an excellent blog post about running with a
small /boot partition and ZFS on the root filesystem (and everything
else). His blog post is what I used to guide me through the initial
steps of the GELI+ZFS root setup.
Look at http://planet.freebsdish.org/ for Rink's blog post, or if it has
fallen off the top of the blog planet queue, Google for it. It may be a
very handy guide to have around in printed dead-tree format when you
attempt to install and tune ZFS.
Cheers, and have fun with FreeBSD,
Giorgos
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