*BSD News Article 66203


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From: jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com (Joe Greco)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,news.admin.technical,news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: Poor performance with INN and FreeBSD.
Date: 16 Apr 1996 23:36:25 -0400
Organization: Marquette Electronics, Inc. - Milwaukee, WI.
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In news.admin.technical article <4kea27$6f0@kelewan.dandelion.com>, lnz@dandelion.com (Leonard N. Zubkoff) wrote:
:Indeed, striping for news is a win if done properly.  You do not want
:concatenation.  Consider a 14GB news spool composed of 7 2GB disks that's
:only 85% full.  With a concentated file system, a random I/O load will be
:spread only across the first 6 disks since file systems will generally
:optimize for locality.  If we stripe those 7 disks instead, we are
:guaranteed to be spreading the random I/O load across all the spindles.
:The key point is to make sure the stripe width is set large enough that the
:typical I/O transaction only needs to access one of the 7 drives.

Bingo, but not many people seem to understand that  :-)

Under FreeBSD, I've been using "just 2048" as a somewhat arbitrary number 
to do this.  It would probably be better to split on something like cylinder
group boundaries.  I've been thinking about redoing this partition:

/dev/rccd0e:    8380352 sectors in 2046 cylinders of 1 tracks, 4096 sectors
	4092.0MB in 128 cyl groups (16 c/g, 32.00MB/g, 7680 i/g)

with a stripe size of (16 c/g * 1 tr * 4096 sec) = 65536..  that's
essentially alternating every 32MB between disks.

I don't know how ideal that is..

... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/546-7968