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Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 09:37:27 -0500 (EST)
From: Steve Ames <steve@ns1.cioe.com>
Message-Id: <199709161437.JAA13809@ns1.cioe.com>
To: freebsd-isp@freebsd.org
Subject: best news server config
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I'm having some serious problems with our newsfeed. The bottom line seems
to be that our server just isn't keeping up with the feed. The server
is a Pentium 150 with 96M of memory. I have two 4G SCSI drives bound
together with ccd (interleave 65536 as recommended in the ccd man page).

I have any the actual news spool mounted with async and noatime. The partition
with the history and active files is mounted async.

I am using inn 1.5.1 compiled using MMAP.

Everything seems quite sprightly. However when I check the news stats from
one of my feeds (sprintlink) it shows that they are throwing about 65% of
the articles away before trying to send them to me. I also have a constant
backlog of about 9700 articles (cap being 10,000 before they start throwing
away articles instead of spooling).

Comparing the articles that show up on my server with articles that show up
on another ISPs news server is quite depressing.

I can't seem to peg the bottle neck here. 'top' shows that the CPU never
goes below 60% idle. So not CPU. Very little swapping is occuring so 
memory shouldn't be a real big issue. That only leaves drive and network
speed.

The drives are normal scsi attached by an adaptec 2940 controller. Is this
the problem? Would putting in an external raid array with a wider controller
fix my problem or am I looking in the wrong place?

A lot of you must run successful news servers. What's your configuration look
like? Do you take a full feed everyday? How many articles/meg do you get?

If I could pin down something definate I'd roll with it and get it fixed...

							-STEve