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From: terry@spcvxb.spc.edu (Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr.)
Subject: Re: News &FreeBSD
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: spcvxa.spc.edu
References: <819230783.26685@loddon.demon.co.uk> <4b2pkd$o9b@news.quanta.com> <4b6u0o$hpi@tzlink.j51.com> <4b9b66$342@sidhe.hsc-sec.fr>
Sender: news@spcuna.spc.edu (Network News)
X-Nntp-Posting-User: TERRY
Organization: St. Peter's College, US
Date: Wed, 20 Dec 1995 21:33:32 GMT
Message-ID: <1995Dec20.163332.1@spcvxb.spc.edu>
Lines: 50
Distribution: inet
In article <4b9b66$342@sidhe.hsc-sec.fr>, roberto@keltia.freenix.fr (Ollivier Robert) writes:
> In article <4b6u0o$hpi@tzlink.j51.com>, Louis Epstein <lepslog@j51.com> wrote:
>> Hmmm...I'm in the process of setting up a FreeBSD 2.1 news server,using
>> CNews because the news feed provider says it gives better performance
>> for given resources than INN.
>
> I don't agree. INN is more powerful than Cnews IMHO and far easier to
> maintain. Who is this misguided news feed provider ? :-)
It's me (or if you prefer, New York Network).
We feed about 100 customers varying amounts of news. Almost all of those
customers have a single newsfeed (us). Our experience in over a year of
heavy-duty newsfeeding is that our customers using C News are better able
to keep up with the feed (compared to INN). In fact, if I telnet to a cus-
tomer's NNTP port and IHAVE a Message-ID, with most of the C News customers
the response is nearly instant, while many of the INN customers exhibit a
second or so of "think time" before responding. This repeats for subsequent
articles, so it isn't just a one-time startup thing.
It may very well be that these customers have INN configured improperly.
However, with the variety of customers we have, I'd expect that *somebody*
would get it right. INN has a goodly number of performance tweaks which can
have really bad effects in some environments (such as the MMAP stuff). The
only possible misconfig I know of in C News + NNTP is in NNTP, where the
default for NEWSRUN is to pause receiving until C News processes the batches
NNTP gave it.
In fact, we even run C News on our news machines, though that's mostly
for historical reasons. We exchange news with about 10 backbone servers and
have no problem keeping up (which is more than I can say for some of those
backbone servers 8-). We're usually about number 150 or so in the inpaths
survey (we recently renamed our backbone host - it was spcuna, now it's news.
new-york.net - if you go looking for us). The news servers are 3 Pentium 90's
(for memory capacity, not CPU speed) each with either 64MB or 96MB of RAM, a
BusLogic BT-946C controller, 2 Seagate Barracuda 2LP's and 1 Barracuda 4,
running BSDI's BSD/OS 2.0.1.
There are some good features in INN, and if INN ever resolves the version
split (1.4sec, 1.4unoff2, 1.4unoff3) and gets all of the features working
(my main interest is streaming mode, which has had many reported problems
[see news.software.nntp for details] in certain situations) I'll investigate
it again for our backbone servers. I expect I'll bring streaming mode to C
News + NNTP instead, though.
Terry Kennedy Operations Manager, Academic Computing
terry@spcvxa.spc.edu St. Peter's College, Jersey City, NJ USA
+1 201 915 9381 (voice) +1 201 435-3662 (FAX)
[Not a New York Network .sig, but it'll do if you want to send me mail 8-]