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Date: Sun, 15 Sep 1996 21:38:40 +0200
To: isp@freebsd.org
From: petzi@zit.th-darmstadt.de (Michael Beckmann)
Subject: INN history file and disk I/O
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Hello ISPs,

I have run into a problem with one of my newsservers recently. It is a
P120, 64 MB, Adaptec 2940, 3 SCSI drives running FreeBSD 980801-SNAP. INN
version 1.4unoff4. It receives and sends several full feeds, but is hardly
used by readers.

In general, the performance of this system is good; I see about 5 - 10 %
cpu load and almost no swap usage. I get immediate response from the
system, except when I try to telnet to the nntp port. nntp readers simply
time out; it takes forever until the INN prompt appears, if it appears at
all. This situation changes when I throttle the INN. Then I get the INN
prompt immediately.

Using systat -vm, I have found out that it has 80 - 100 disk seeks per
second on the disk that carries the history file (which is about 90 MB
large). When I move the history file, it is the other disk that gets hit,
so it definitely is the history file that causes this I/O. Could this be
the reason for my problem ?

Sometimes I see messages like this in the log:
Sep 15 21:07:00 news innd: ME cant sendto CCreader bytes 4 No such file or
directory
I don't know if this is relevant here.

Any experiences on how to deal with that ? Suggestions are welcome.

Michael