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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.hawaii.edu!ames!haven.umd.edu!decuac!pa.dec.com!vixie From: vixie@pa.dec.com (Paul A Vixie) Subject: Re: [386BSD] Problems installing cnews/nn In-Reply-To: geoff@world.std.com's message of Mon, 30 Nov 1992 00:40:10 GMT Message-ID: <VIXIE.92Nov30104256@cognition.pa.dec.com> Sender: news@PA.dec.com (News) Organization: DEC Network Software Lab References: <1992Nov27.153032.10611@uropax.contrib.de> <1fav2bINN2ie@tricky.wft.stack.urc.tue.nl> <ByI76y.75o@world.std.com> Date: 30 Nov 92 10:42:56 Lines: 49 I'm not sure this is the ideal forum to discuss the relative merits of C News vs. INN. However, Geoff asked a question and I am qualified to answer it :-)... Geoff Collyer: >Jim Rump: >>I would try INN. INN can do what cnews can and more. > >That's an interesting claim. What do believe INN can do that C News can't? Handle 35 simultaneous inbound/outbound NNTP feeds and 135 UUCP neighbors without melting my computer. C News spends a lot of its time talking to my msgidd -- context switches galore -- or forking/execing zillions of small processes (a lot of them shell scripts). Its locking is explicitly non-dependent on system calls, which means there is no synchronous unlock -- if A is waiting for B and B completes, then A will still wait until the end of a 60 second timer before grabbing the contended resource. If something else happens to start in that interval, A could end up waiting *even longer*. C News has very little built into it to handle "out of VM" or "out of file table slots" or "out of process table slots" -- if these things happen, and on DECWRL and other big machines they *DO* happen, C News either silently dies or decides to lock up and do nothing until the situation improves. You havn't truly died 1,000 deaths until your expire won't run because there is not enough disk space... and your relaynews won't run because there is not enough disk space... and the reason that you don't have any disk space is because expire isn't running and in.coming is full. C News got DECWRL through a bad couple of years. B News couldn't possibly have handled it. We are now at the same point with C News -- there's no way DECWRL could switch back to C News and live. >>It also is a lot smaller. > >How are you measuring size? Certainly not the sizes of the processes >involved. It's faster and simpler to build, it contains fewer executable and library files, and it only runs a few processes at a time. C News seems designed on the principle that processes are cheap, and maybe on V8 they are -- but in BSD-land it's a bad thing to have 200 processes in the run queue. C News still has a world-class UUCP batcher and I'm trying to figure out how to bolt it onto the back of INN. I've got a perl script that does a little bit of it but I really do miss the batchparms file. -- Paul Vixie, DEC Network Systems Lab Palo Alto, California, USA "Don't be a rebel, or a conformist; <vixie@pa.dec.com> decwrl!vixie they're the same thing, anyway. Find <paul@vix.com> vixie!paul your own path, and stay on it." -me