From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Oct 10 21:55:04 1995 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id VAA22505 for questions-outgoing; Tue, 10 Oct 1995 21:55:04 -0700 Received: from terra.aros.net (angio@[205.164.111.2]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id VAA22500 for ; Tue, 10 Oct 1995 21:55:02 -0700 Received: (from angio@localhost) by terra.aros.net (8.6.12/8.6.12) id WAA16550; Tue, 10 Oct 1995 22:54:53 -0600 From: Dave Andersen Message-Id: <199510110454.WAA16550@terra.aros.net> Subject: Re: NEWS server To: nathan@netrail.net (Nathan Stratton) Date: Tue, 10 Oct 1995 22:54:53 -0600 (MDT) Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: from "Nathan Stratton" at Oct 10, 95 11:09:17 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1940 Sender: owner-questions@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk Lo and behold, Nathan Stratton once said: > > On Tue, 10 Oct 1995, Dave Andersen wrote: > > > Cpu states: 0.4% user, 2.3% nice, 3.5% system, 3.1% interrupt, 90.7% idle > > > > There were 10 users reading news as of that snapshot. By *far* our > > biggest limitation is in the disk area. The best thing about going > Yes, but how many feeds you you recive and how many do you send? We > recive news from MCI, Sprint, and UUNet. And have a bunch of sites we > feed news to. We have 4 sites feeding us full feeds, though one of them is down for some reason (the admin went on vacation and things crashed right after. D'oh), and we feed one site. Even if you're handling lots of feeds, it just means more disk i/o. *shrug* The load goes up when nntpsend runs, because it has to parse the out.going/* files, but the rest of the time, things only bog down when you get lots of people reading news and it eclipses the available ram. if you find that maintaining multiple newsfeeds (in and out) causes the load to be high ordinarily on your server, your money would probably be better spent on another computer which was dedicated only to managing your newsfeeds, which in turn fed the news machine which your users have access to. *shrug* More complicated to maintain, but without fabulously expensive hardware, there are a lot of limitations on I/O that you're going to get with any computer system. (Admittedly, buying a sparc 20 with several large RAIDs would probably handle things much more elegantly, but consider the price-performance, _and_ the exceptionally wasted processing power of the sparc). -Dave Andersen -- angio@aros.net Complete virtual hosting and business-oriented system administration Internet services. (WWW, FTP, email) http://www.aros.net/ http://www.aros.net/about/virtual/ "She totally confused all the passing piranhas"