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Date:      Thu, 23 Mar 2000 00:59:09 +0100
From:      Brad Knowles <blk@skynet.be>
To:        "Forrest W. Christian" <forrestc@iMach.com>, Christian Jachmann <jachmann@gigabell.net>
Cc:        Carroll Kong <damascus@eden.rutgers.edu>, "stable@freebsd.org" <stable@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Off-topic News: WAS: Re: 3.4-Stable crashes..(heavy diskio+networking)
Message-ID:  <v0422080bb4ff0c9f9449@[194.78.238.239]>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003221616410.11809-100000@workhorse.iMach.com>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003221616410.11809-100000@workhorse.iMach.com>

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At 4:30 PM -0700 2000/3/22, Forrest W. Christian wrote:

>  I know this doesn't solve your problem but have you looked at the highwind
>  products (Typhoon and Cyclone/Breeze)?  See
>  http://bcandid.com/products/index.html

	They aren't available for FreeBSD.  They make heavy use of 
threading, and do not perform well under current versions of the OS. 
There used to be a version available for FreeBSD, but it has since 
been withdrawn due to excessive problems.

>  Although I haven't run a news server for a while now, when I did, these
>  products saved us literally hundreds if not thousands of dollars of
>  hardware.   We went from a load average of 10+ on a $10,000 Sparc to <.1
>  on the same hardware switching from INN to cyclone.  It looks like INN has
>  implemented some of the functionality which make these products sooooo
>  fast, but it might still be worth a look.

	Cyclone and the other bCandid products may help reduce end-to-end 
latency throughout the system and may be very easy to manage with a 
nice GUI, etc..., but I know of at least one very large news site 
(one of the biggest on the 'net ;-) that has experienced too many 
problems with it and they are reverting to INN, which they have a 
*lot* of previous experience with.


	Speaking for myself, I think I can do most of the things 
Cyclone/bCandid might be able to do for me, but using freely 
available software such as Diablo.  I'd pay a lot less money, and I 
wouldn't be forced to use hardware that handles threading well, so I 
could keep my FreeBSD boxes and not have to turn them in for Sun 
Solaris/SPARC boxen.

	In fact, there are some things that Diablo can do that even 
Cyclone/bCandid can't, and there are major news sites that may run 
Cyclone on their news peers (they don't want to drop too far out of 
the Top Ten), but they prefer Diablo and that is what is on their 
news spool & news reader servers.

>  FWIW, the box "average uptime" also went from typically a day or so with
>  INN to weeks or months with cyclone.  The OS would croak about once a day
>  with INN, quite frequently requiring a manual fsck -y.

	INN can be pretty cranky, if you don't have it configured just 
right.  I believe that Diablo tends to be quite a bit less cranky, 
and is quite a bit easier to manage, add new feeds, etc....

	There's also some really cool code that will be coming out soon 
with Diablo, which I think will give it a major leg up on all the 
other systems.


	Besides, the Father of Diablo is Matt Dillon, and he's now deeply 
involved in fixing large portions of some of the deepest darkest code 
within FreeBSD, so it's only right that we would advocate the use of 
his program on mailing lists associated with him.  ;-)

--
   These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy
======================================================================
Brad Knowles, <blk@skynet.be>                || Belgacom Skynet SA/NV
Systems Architect, Mail/News/FTP/Proxy Admin || Rue Colonel Bourg, 124
Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.13.11/12.49             || B-1140 Brussels
http://www.skynet.be                         || Belgium


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