From owner-freebsd-isp Wed Feb 14 23:00:56 1996 Return-Path: owner-isp Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id XAA16592 for isp-outgoing; Wed, 14 Feb 1996 23:00:56 -0800 (PST) Received: from zip.io.org (root@zip.io.org [198.133.36.80]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id XAA16574 Wed, 14 Feb 1996 23:00:50 -0800 (PST) Received: (from taob@localhost) by zip.io.org (8.6.12/8.6.12) id CAA28634; Thu, 15 Feb 1996 02:00:28 -0500 Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 02:00:27 -0500 (EST) From: Brian Tao To: Rashid Karimov cc: lray@aurora.liunet.edu, FREEBSD-QUESTIONS-L , FREEBSD-ISP-L Subject: Building a large FreeBSD news server In-Reply-To: <199502150637.BAA29572@rk.ios.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-isp@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk On Wed, 15 Feb 1995, Rashid Karimov wrote: > > Have you tried renumbering your active file to see if that fixes > > the problem? See the ctlinnd command. > > yes , it should solve the problem ... Good advice is to > get and read thru the INN FAQ - it's absolutely the Best > FAQ IMHO. Yep, people aren't kidding when they say that. Between the FAQ and the Install.[12] documentation with inn-1.4unoff3, I was able to get my very first large-scale INN server running in about an hour after unpacking the source. Within a day, I was running crossfeeds with 4 other sites. For something as complex as Usenet news administration, it was dead simple to setup. > what is expirience with running FreeBSD PCs as INND > servers with full news feed ? Is it capable of handling > the load ? Any IO/CPU limitations ? I have the same questions, since I'm just starting out here. My server will be going into full production mode within a few days (it's been running with about a dozen beta testers for a week now). > I run P6-200 here as news server - runs just fine, load > averages are ~0.3-0.5 , readers peak at ~200-300, total > of ~23.000 newsgroups in active, 3 days expire average, > 370.000 - 420.000 inodes used in /usr/spool/uucp. P133, 128 megabytes RAM, 3 NCR53c810 controllers and nine disks to be split up thusly (I don't have all the controllers plugged in yet): sd0 1GB /, /usr, /var, swap sd1 2GB /usr/local/news sd2 2GB /var/spool/news/alt sd10 2GB /var/spool/news, swap sd11 2GB /var/spool/news/over.db sd12 2GB /var/spool/news/out.going, /var/spool/uucp sd20 2GB /var/spool/news/comp, /var/spool/news/soc, swap sd21 2GB /var/spool/news/misc, /var/spool/news/rec sd22 4GB /var/spool/news/alt/binaries At the moment, I have the news spool spread over two 2GB Quantum Atlas drives and a 4GB Quantum Grand Prix, running off a single Buslogics BT-946C controller. It receives about 120,000 articles a day (900MB or so), with 20000 groups in the active file. Only about 7000 of those actually have articles in them so far. ;-) I have the history database, the overview files and the alt.binaries spool on a single disk on the current machine, and that disk is getting hit pretty hard according to iostat. That's being split across three spindles and three controllers in the production machine, so disk I/O should not be a problem. A delayed expire run takes less than 5 minutes to generate the list of articles to delete, which fastrm processes in about 30 minutes. I expect that to rise once we get a hundred readers on it at once, and more articles to expire. It seems INN is only spooling about 2 articles per second, peaking at around 5/sec for very short periods of time. Perhaps this will improve once I'm using multiple controllers and more disks? -- Brian Tao (BT300, taob@io.org) Systems Administrator, Internex Online Inc. "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't"