Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1998 23:51:44 +0800 From: richard <richard@sneaker.net.au> To: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Usenet performance issues (was Re: RAID solutions?) Message-ID: <367928901FE.23E8RICHARD@mail.sneaker.net.au> In-Reply-To: <3678E57E.12B2@realtime.net> References: <l03110705b29e428c72d1@[192.168.1.10]> <3678E57E.12B2@realtime.net>
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> For a fraction of the cost of yahu (yet another hardware upgrade) > we purchased better software. The result? I'm using Dnews, a > commercial software package costing less than $500... and my > hardware appears idle. I pull in about 2 megabits average on this > machine, yet the load remains very low, and the filesystem has > plenty of idle cycles. This machine has the appearance of doing > a fraction of the work my old INN workhorse was doing. > > Dnews was more than a major performance gain. In the INN days, being > a news administrator was a big part of my daily job. With Dnews I > check on news when *I* have time. I never find myself doing the > kind of work i did under INN. It took me 30 minutes to bring the > Dnews machine on-line, and over the course of a year and a half I > have spent a total of about 4 hours maintaining it. I hazard to guess > I would have spent 400 to 1000 hours had I still been running INN, > and there would have been numerous software upgrades and other events > resulting in downtime. We did invest about 20 hours of programming > time wiring Dnews into our user authentication system, which included > custom software mods added by the Dnews programmers. The Dnews > guys did my mods for free, turning them around in about 2 days! > The <$500 price tag I paid for the software was way too low for > what I got. > > Dnews is not the only software out there that is better than INN... > it is just the one I tried. I have heard similar things about > several other packages, but I'll let those software users speak > for themselves. I have pointed other ISP's at Dnews, and so far > I have heard nothing but good things from them. > > I run my Dnews on a dual pentium pro (180MHZ) system, using the > Dmulti feature of Dnews to run 4 copies of the executable... > 1 for incoming news, and three for readers. The SMP was not > needed for this application after all, were I rebuilding the > machine today I would stick to a single CPU. Dnews handles article > storage across multiple filesystems using a small number of files > per drive (article files are grouped together in larger clusters > called "buckets" keeping the filecount low). > > It is just a guess, but I'd venture that a 100mhz pentium with a > medium speed filesystem would be enough to make a full feed work > through Dnews. Raid 10 on super-servers with lots and lots of > performance tuning.... Seems like too much work and money to me. > > Oh and the Dnews guys do mail servers too... You guys being > shut-down because spammers are hammering your sendmail... There > ARE performance options for you out there... Find out about > Dnews and Dmail from www.netwinsite.com. > > I came across a ISP using DNEWS, whenever I access a group, my requests will be placed into a long queue waiting for a long long fetching the group ....... I didn't like it and left the ISP. Surely, as the administrator or owner of ISP , people love DNEWS, but as a user, you might have different view over the DNEWS. regards, To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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