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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.mathworks.com!uunet!in1.uu.net!twwells!twwells!not-for-mail From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD as news-server?? Date: 12 Oct 1996 23:03:08 -0400 Organization: None, Mt. Laurel, NJ Lines: 45 Message-ID: <53pm5c$5ks@twwells.com> References: <537ddl$3cc@amd40.wecs.org> <53ffcu$ktm@itchy.serv.net> <Dz375G.76v@news2.new-york.net> <53ott7$579@adv.IAEhv.nl> NNTP-Posting-Host: twwells.com In article <53ott7$579@adv.IAEhv.nl>, Arjan de Vet <devet@adv.IAEhv.nl> wrote: : Shouldn't make too much difference. However an upgrade to INN would... No, it wouldn't. Almost certainly, INN is slower for a single incoming newsfeed than C news. In this day of huge news spool directories, it is absolutely necessary that the process accepting incoming NNTP *not* write the articles to the spool. The latency this introduces into the protocol slows it down way too much. (No, streaming doesn't help -- many providers have found quite the opposite and have stopped using it....) With bare INN, you cannot even get 2 articles/second on typical PC hardware. If you decouple INN from incoming NNTP, you can get about 2.5 articles/second. If you arrange that spool directories are kept small, you can get 3.5 articles/second. These are sustained rates, averaged over periods of hours and days. Yes, these are real, measured, numbers -- I've done a *lot* of work on my news server trying to cope with INN's deficiencies. A full feed is about 2.5 articles/second, so you can expect that INN will not keep up with typical PC hardware. C news is, in effect, a decoupled system and, more importantly, unlike INN, isn't a memory hog. Thus you can expect C news to function more efficiently than INN for a given piece of hardware and a single incoming feed. It still won't be fast enough for a full feed on typical hardware. If you have more than one incoming feed, things get complex. I'll save my fingers explaining why, as I have no reason to believe that this person has more than one feed. Anyway, a news server is essentially disk-bound. You *don't* want it swapping because that'll slow it down even more. Thus adequate memory is essential. If you're swapping and falling behind, adding more memory is a good idea. You can also improve matters with fast disks and a good SCSI controller. You can also turn off synchronous writes on the news spool; this *may* speed things up a bit. However, it's a good idea to have a UPS if you do, as a power failure at the wrong moment can totally trash your news spool. Finally, if you're going to be using an Adaptec controller, don't run 2.1; use 2.1.5 instead. It'll panic periodically unless you do.