Date: Wed, 6 Mar 96 17:36:42 CST From: Joe Greco <jgreco@solaria.sol.net> To: mtaylor@cybernet.com Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Proper FreeBSD news machine Message-ID: <199603062336.RAA04112@solaria.sol.net> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.960306181309.mtaylor@cybernet.com> from "mtaylor@cybernet.com" at Mar 6, 96 05:47:30 pm
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> Hi Joe, hackers- > > We've recently gotten a full T1 link to the Internet, and along with it, > a news feed. I have the T1 and news feed on a 486 DX2/66 machine, with > 2 SCSI tape drives and 4 SCSI disks (all on one Adaptec 1542B controller), > with 16 Mb RAM and 100 Mb of swap. do you mean that you're using the DX2/66 as a router too? > I was wondering about the slow performance of innd-1.4 wrt > getting the news artices- it gets about 1 article per second. This > makes it kinda lag behind- it'll never get all the articles at this > rate. (I'm receiving receiving ~5000 of the possible 16k+ newsgroups, and > I will subscribe to more when I get the performance up). you are correct sir. :-) > What kind of machine should I be using for the news spooler? Let me sketch out my news operation here. I have multiple news peers, very few readers, I retain about a million articles (5 to 7 days retention).. > A) 486DX2/66 fast enough? need a Pentium-133? news.sol.net was a DX4/100 up until yesterday. I upgraded because I got a good deal, not because CPU was much of an issue. I'd say I was running 30-40% idle. That suggests a DX2/66 would be squeaky, though. The box is now a P90 and I notice a slight performance improvement. > B) how much RAM? 32 Mb enough? No. In particular look at the size of history.pag as a clue to how much RAM you need. My many-years-tried-and-true INN RAM formula is: Memory: 16MB + sizeof(history.pag) * 2MB + numclients * 1MB + numfeeds * 1MB. "clients" are expected simultaneous nnrp's. feeds are outbound feeds, innxmit or nntplink, no matter. sizeof(history.pag) in megabytes. For me this translates into 16MB + 16 * 2MB + 5 * 1MB + 15 * 1MB = 68MB. Here's the reasoning. In order to do history lookups efficiently, INN must retain a complete copy of history.pag incore. Failure to do so is very costly. Now consider expires: expire also needs to be able to simultaneously hold a new history.pag open. If it does not have enough RAM, it will begin to fight for pages with INN, and both your innd and expire processes will slow to a crawl. You also must factor in memory for other running processes (i.e. clients and feeds), and the OS itself needs some RAM (16MB, let's say, for kernel, cache, scratch, etc). > C) would separate SCSI busses help? (I plan to put a second 4.3Gb HD > in for the rest of the news spool) Go PCI SCSI if you can. Also, the more disks, the merrier (I have 14 but then I'm a performance freak). > D) whose SCSI card has the 'best' performance? I've had good luck with the AHA3940 and NCR-810 based cards. The AHA2940 should work well too. > E) newfs- what options for creating spool disks? (-i 1024, etc.) -b 4096 -f 512 -- except for your alt.binaries disk, which I create with default params because it doesn't matter. > I've found FreeBSD to be very useful over the last few years. I > appreciate the work that has gone into it. Thanks to WC, and all > the core team! Me too :-) > -Mark Taylor > SysAdmin (only when necessary!) > mtaylor@cybernet.com Pay close attention to the memory advice. I see so many people try to get by without enough memory. It doesn't pay. I run Exec-PC's news operation and they try to squeeze 150-200 nnrp clients onto a box with 128MB RAM. They complain to me that it "takes forever to connect". I wonder why. ;-) ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847
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