Date: Fri, 8 Mar 1996 01:07:14 +1100 (EST) From: michael butler <imb@scgt.oz.au> To: mtaylor@cybernet.com Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Proper FreeBSD news machine Message-ID: <199603071407.BAA10970@asstdc.scgt.oz.au> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.960306181309.mtaylor@cybernet.com> from "mtaylor@cybernet.com" at Mar 6, 96 05:47:30 pm
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mtaylor@cybernet.com writes: > We've recently gotten a full T1 link to the Internet, and along with it, > a news feed. I have the T1 and news feed on a 486 DX2/66 machine, with > 2 SCSI tape drives and 4 SCSI disks (all on one Adaptec 1542B controller), > with 16 Mb RAM and 100 Mb of swap. > I was wondering about the slow performance of innd-1.4 wrt > getting the news artices- it gets about 1 article per second. OUCH ! Until recently, this machine was a 386DX/40, BT542B, 2 SCSI devices, 20 meg of RAM and 64 meg of swap. With the "streaming mode" patches to nntpd, it would receive articles at the rate of 3 per second across a 64k link. It simply didn't have the address space to accomodate INN so I ran C-News but it performed quite well for what it was. It had two major problem areas .. it was usual for processing of the inbound material to fall well behind (up to ~30k articles) through the lack of disk bandwidth and CPU. It was also almost impossible to feed any more than about 5 "downlinks". Adding more just increased the size of the unprocessed inbound queue. It is now a 486DX4/100 with an Adaptec 2842 and the rate at which articles are received has not changed, implying that either the ISDN link or the Sun at the other end is the limiting factor. It still runs C-News but with 32 meg of RAM. However, there is now no (significant) inbound or outbound backlog. > What kind of machine should I be using for the news spooler? > A) 486DX2/66 fast enough? need a Pentium-133? For a T1 inbound, a 486 is unlikely to scale well to many outbound streams. > B) how much RAM? 32 Mb enough? If you're intending to run many outbound queues, INN is definitely the go (with streaming patches) and get as much memory as is financially viable. > C) would separate SCSI busses help? (I plan to put a second 4.3Gb HD > in for the rest of the news spool) Splitting the history and active files away from any other section of your spool area is the most performance-enhancing thing you can do. From there, split alt, comp and whatever else needs to be on separate file-systems for more space-oriented reasons. This could be on separate spindles or (better) busses as your budget might permit. > D) whose SCSI card has the 'best' performance? This is highly dependent on the motherboard you have to put it in (stating the bleeding obvious :-)) .. PCI is better than VESA or EISA is better than ISA. Any decent card, Adaptec or BusLogic will do what you need. Note one specific exception - a BT445S is of absolutely no benefit at all over a 1542 through its inability to avoid the use of "bounce-buffers". > E) newfs- what options for creating spool disks? (-i 1024, etc.) For hierarchies with lots of little files (i.e. almost all but alt.binaries), you need more inodes than the default but be aware that this does incur a slight performance penalty. > BTW- > I've found FreeBSD to be very useful over the last few years. I > appreciate the work that has gone into it. Thanks to WC, and all > the core team! With only the odd little hiccup now and then, FreeBSD beats the commercial flavours I was using previously without question. If you can, run a second box (no need to be fancy) to track the current -stable release and only take snapshots of it onto your production box at prudent times. This gets you stability and reliability whilst maintaining the currency of programmed responses to CERT advisories, michael
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