From owner-freebsd-isp  Thu Sep 19 08:40:14 1996
Return-Path: owner-isp
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id IAA28830
          for isp-outgoing; Thu, 19 Sep 1996 08:40:14 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from brasil.moneng.mei.com (brasil.moneng.mei.com [151.186.109.160])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id IAA28765
          for <freebsd-isp@freebsd.org>; Thu, 19 Sep 1996 08:40:07 -0700 (PDT)
Received: (from jgreco@localhost) by brasil.moneng.mei.com (8.7.Beta.1/8.7.Beta.1) id KAA10990; Thu, 19 Sep 1996 10:38:44 -0500
From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Message-Id: <199609191538.KAA10990@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
Subject: Re: News server...
To: henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu (Charles Henrich)
Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 10:38:43 -0500 (CDT)
Cc: jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com, freebsd-isp@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199609191334.JAA11336@crh.cl.msu.edu> from "Charles Henrich" at Sep 19, 96 09:34:35 am
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24]
Content-Type: text
Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

> Joe, what parameters do you give to newfs for your news spools?

I used to use -b 4096 -f 512... the Usenet traditional... but I am
going to be doing some tests this week because I am seeing some unusual
bottlenecking in article throughput on some of the systems I maintain..


> (And Im still skeptical on your stripe size of a CG, but im being convinced
> slowly :)   The problem as I see it is that we have millions of 4k articles.
> Okay, so maybe a stripe size of 4k is poor because of directory look ups and
> what not, but why not a stripe size in the range of 128k or 256k, why jump all
> the way up to 32MB, seems that you will miss the "sweet" spot that striping can
> get you..

You can experiment if you want :-)  Yes, 128k or 256k may be better (bear in
mind that many binaries articles are 1_MB_) and I have seen 1.5MB junk
directories..  so I would probably not select a number < 2MB.

Obviously the sweet spot is probably going to be someplace between
1MB and the size of the disk ;-)  But I suspect it is somehow going to
be tied to how ffs works internally.

I also do not have a GOOD set of tools with which to measure concurrency
within a news filesystem.  I have some basic programs that I run several
of simultaneously, but how fair they are?  Dunno.  It is certainly a
problem that could use a researcher.  All I am interested in is convincing
people that a stripe size of 8K is _foolish_.  :-)

... JG