From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Dec 4 10:41:52 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: FreeBSD-Questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E71F21065679 for ; Thu, 4 Dec 2008 10:41:51 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) Received: from igloo.linux.gr (igloo.linux.gr [62.1.205.36]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6325E8FC1E for ; Thu, 4 Dec 2008 10:41:51 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) Received: from kobe.laptop (adsl37-141.kln.forthnet.gr [77.49.164.141]) (authenticated bits=128) by igloo.linux.gr (8.14.3/8.14.3/Debian-5) with ESMTP id mB4AfgZu000428 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NOT); Thu, 4 Dec 2008 12:41:48 +0200 Received: from kobe.laptop (kobe.laptop [127.0.0.1]) by kobe.laptop (8.14.3/8.14.3) with ESMTP id mB4Afgfc002087; Thu, 4 Dec 2008 12:41:42 +0200 (EET) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) Received: (from keramida@localhost) by kobe.laptop (8.14.3/8.14.3/Submit) id mB4Aff5q002086; Thu, 4 Dec 2008 12:41:41 +0200 (EET) (envelope-from keramida@ceid.upatras.gr) From: Giorgos Keramidas To: Kevin Monceaux In-Reply-To: (Kevin Monceaux's message of "Wed, 3 Dec 2008 22:44:29 -0600 (CST)") Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 08:35:21 +0200 Message-ID: <8763m04fdi.fsf@kobe.laptop> References: <20081203202155.GA84629@slackbox.xs4all.nl> <87abbciqgr.fsf@kobe.laptop> User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/23.0.60 (berkeley-unix) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-MailScanner-ID: mB4AfgZu000428 X-Hellug-MailScanner: Found to be clean X-Hellug-MailScanner-SpamCheck: not spam, SpamAssassin (not cached, score=-3.837, required 5, ALL_TRUSTED -1.80, AWL 0.52, BAYES_00 -2.60, DATE_IN_PAST_03_06 0.04) X-Hellug-MailScanner-From: keramida@ceid.upatras.gr X-Spam-Status: No Cc: Giorgos Keramidas , FreeBSD Questions E-Mail List Subject: Re: Returning User With Filesystem/Memory Tuning Questions X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:41:52 -0000 On Wed, 3 Dec 2008 22:44:29 -0600 (CST), Kevin Monceaux 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