From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Nov 20 19:52:55 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id TAA02339 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 20 Nov 1996 19:52:55 -0800 (PST) Received: from asstdc.scgt.oz.au (root@asstdc.scgt.oz.au [202.14.234.65]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id TAA02333 for ; Wed, 20 Nov 1996 19:52:38 -0800 (PST) Received: (from imb@localhost) by asstdc.scgt.oz.au (8.7.6/BSD4.4) id OAA03624 Thu, 21 Nov 1996 14:51:57 +1100 (EST) From: michael butler Message-Id: <199611210351.OAA03624@asstdc.scgt.oz.au> Subject: Re: Disk Striping In-Reply-To: from "Darrin R. Woods" at "Nov 20, 96 11:14:31 am" To: dwoods@netgazer.com (Darrin R. Woods) Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 14:51:56 +1100 (EST) Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL28 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Darrin R. Woods writes: > I just got my news server up and running INN (thanks to everyone that > helped), but now I'm looking for a better way of dealing with it. I've got > 3 Fast/Wide 4gb disks to hold news. It would be a lot easier (and better > performance) if I could stripe (or span) the /var partition accross the 3 > disks instead of having to guess as to how to partition each drive and into > what sizes. With "only" three drives, you don't want to stripe across them. There are four activities which consume disk resources: i) maintenance of the active and history files ii) maintenance of the overview hierarchy iii) writing out the articles themselves iv) scribbling to /var/log/news Whilst the latter is comparatively "cheap" as it simply extends an existing file (writes deferred by caching), the first three are best spread across separate spindles for the best resultant performance. Striping or concatenation will hurt more than help, michael