Date: Tue, 5 Nov 1996 13:20:24 -0800 (PST) From: Veggy Vinny <richardc@CSUA.Berkeley.EDU> To: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> Cc: michaelv@MindBender.serv.net, mark@quickweb.com, terry@lambert.org, imp@village.org, jmb@freefall.freebsd.org, isp@FreeBSD.ORG, Chad Shackley <chad@gaianet.net>, "[Mario1-]" <mario1@PrimeNet.Com>, JbHunt <johnnyu@accessus.net> Subject: Re: /usr/obj size Message-ID: <Pine.PTX.3.95.961105130741.13095P-100000@soda.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU> In-Reply-To: <199611051729.LAA06955@brasil.moneng.mei.com>
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On Tue, 5 Nov 1996, Joe Greco wrote: > > On the topic of hard disks, what are the minimum requirements to > > run a FreeBSD machine as a news server with a full news feed in terms of > > CPU, memory, HD Storage and does it have to be on several HD instead of > > multiple large capacity drives such as 9 gig drives? > > Vince, > > IMHO it depends on what you are going to do with the machine. Are you going > to have lots of readers? Lots of inbound and/or outbound feeds? (Remember > that many sites these days feed via "innfeed", and this counts as multiple > feeds)... All the users will be using nntp from within GAIANET.NET. We will have a newsfeed from Concentric Network but will probably have some feeds to others. > It also depends on how long you want to retain news, how many groups are in > your active file (how "full" the feed is), whether or not you want to > support other things on the system, etc. Hmmm, maybe 8-10 days to retain the news and probably want everything in terms of a full feed. > If you are going to have one user reading news and have a single inbound > feed, sorted, held for half a week, and nothing else, you might be able to > do it on a fairly skimpy system. > > My idea of fairly skimpy would be 486DX/133, 64MB RAM (maybe 48MB), a fast > disk for root/var/newslib, and a big disk for spool. You might be able to > get away with less memory by using C-News. We'll have this as the minimum of a sysem. Dual PentiumPro-200Mhz with 128MB of ram and a Seagate Elite 9 9.1 gig Fast Wide SCSI-2 drive to start with. > My standard cuff calculation formula for RAM is: > > 1MB * active readers + 2MB * number of feeds + 8MB for system + 2 * > sizeof(history.pag) > > I consider this to be a minimum. News will make very good use of as > much memory as you can give it. One of my clients considered it to be > an excessive maximum and learned a very expensive lesson when their > news service sucked. Hmmm, when you mean by active readers, you are talking about the amount of nntp clients accessing the newsserver at once? > For a CPU, I have not found a significant need to go beyond a P133. > 'newspump.sol.net' is a P133, and is a dedicated feeds machine. It > ranks #25 in the Freenix ratings this month. A large client has 100-150 > nnrp sessions reading news on their P133 boxes, with CPU to spare. This > game isn't really about CPU, it is more about memory, caching, and I/O. > Besides, CPU is cheap. Hmmm, okay.... Do you or anyone know how well a FreeBSD machine would compare to a SUN? I was saying that the FreeBSD machine can easily do better than the SUN's since I can see how well wcarchive.cdrom.com is doing with the high loads. > Chipset is ultimately important. You WILL not be successful if you buy > a cruddy motherboard/chipset. Buy Triton-II. I recommend the ASUS > P/I-P55T2P4, or P/E-P55T2P4D (see http://www.asus.com.tw). I recommend > buying hardware from Rod Grimes, I have never been disappointed by his > services and support. <sales@gndrsh.aac.dev.com>. Yep, I know. I got a P55TP4XE from Rod and it's still working in one piece today with no problems whatsoever. Too bad mines is the original Triton though. Rod surely knows the part he sells and can give you every bit of info you want to know. > Do not compromise on your I/O system. News is extremely taxing on a > machine's disks. Buy multiple SCSI busses. It is much better to buy > three $70 ASUS SC-200 NCR-810 controllers than one $220 AHA-2940 SCSI > controller (but if you want to spend $660 on three AHA-2940's, that > is not a bad solution either). Buy lots of disks. Stripe them with CCD. > The reader machines noted above have 12 disks each: What about for Wide SCSI or Ultra/UltraWide SCSI drives? Which controllers would be good? > ---------------- ---------------- ---------------- > | sd0 root | | sd10 var | | sd20 newslib | > | 2G ST32550N | | 2G ST32550N | | CCD 1G 31055N| > |--------------| |--------------| |--------------| > | sd1 newslib | | sd11 nov | | sd21 nov | > | CCD 1G 31055N| | CCD 1G 31055N| | CCD 1G 31055N| > |--------------| |--------------| |--------------| > | sd2 news | | sd12 news | | sd22 alt | > | CCD 2G 32550N| | CCD 2G 32550N| | CCD 2G 32550N| > |--------------| |--------------| |--------------| > | sd3 alt | | sd13 binaries| | sd23 binaries| > | CCD 2G 32550N| | CCD 4G 15150N| | CCD 4G 15150N| > ---------------- ---------------- ---------------- I can see that the 2 GIG are all Barracuda's from Seagate but what kind of drives are the others? > Notice I stripe across controllers... also note the rants I have posted > in the past on CCD stripe sizes. Use large ones except for the newslib > disk. Hmmm, how do I do the CCD stripe? I heard you can make multiple drives into one partition under FreeBSD. > With 150 readers, this is DAMN BUSY... > > Rule #1) People always try to cheap out on news servers. > > Rule #2) They fail. > > Remember those rules and you have a chance of designing a good news > service... Yep, that's true. Since it's better to spend more to get quality components than getting it cheap since by the time, you find out, you need to replace all the inferior components. Vince GaiaNet Corporation - Unix Networking Operations - GUS Mailing Lists Admin
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