From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Mar 22 16: 0:37 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from morpheus.skynet.be (morpheus.skynet.be [195.238.2.39]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DE6B937C51D for ; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 16:00:32 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from blk@skynet.be) Received: from [194.78.238.239] (dialup1071.brussels2.skynet.be [194.78.238.239]) by morpheus.skynet.be (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3DA14DA4C; Thu, 23 Mar 2000 01:00:25 +0100 (MET) Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: blk@pop.skynet.be Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2000 00:59:09 +0100 To: "Forrest W. Christian" , Christian Jachmann From: Brad Knowles Subject: Re: Off-topic News: WAS: Re: 3.4-Stable crashes..(heavy diskio+networking) Cc: Carroll Kong , "stable@freebsd.org" Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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 There used to be a version available for FreeBSD, but it has since been withdrawn due to excessive problems.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, || 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message