From owner-freebsd-isp Mon Mar 10 19:47:19 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id TAA23377 for isp-outgoing; Mon, 10 Mar 1997 19:47:19 -0800 (PST) Received: from misery.sdf.com (misery.sdf.com [204.244.210.193]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id TAA23364; Mon, 10 Mar 1997 19:47:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from misery.sdf.com [204.244.213.33] by misery.sdf.com with smtp (Exim 1.59 #1) id 0w4IWL-00075g-00; Mon, 10 Mar 1997 19:46:37 -0800 Date: Mon, 10 Mar 1997 19:46:37 -0800 (PST) From: Tom Samplonius To: Michael Hancock cc: Brian Tao , "matthew c. mead" , isp@freebsd.org, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: freebsd as a news server? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk On Tue, 11 Mar 1997, Michael Hancock wrote: > On Mon, 10 Mar 1997, Tom Samplonius wrote: > > > On Tue, 11 Mar 1997, Michael Hancock wrote: > > > > ... > > > I've been using -i 3072 -b 4096 -f 1024 -a 8 for non-binary newsgroups and > > > the default for binary newsgroups. > > > > > > This way news articles on average will fit in a block. > > > > You always want maxcontig to beigger than 8. It has nothing to do with > > file allocation, only have many sectors are transfered at once to the > > driver. > > And the magic number is ____. As big as possible. All the disk drivers should be able to handle at least 128. I don't really know how big it can be. 256? 1024? A too small maxcontig will hamper scatter/gather. I noticed that by looking at the sps and tps values from iostat that it was never transfering more than 16 sectors per transfer. I bumped up maxcontig, and noticed a nice performance increase (at least for my application). The default maxcontig setting for 2.1.x is just way too small. Tom