Date: Tue, 11 Jul 1995 13:23:18 -0400 (EDT) From: Mark Hittinger <bugs@ns1.win.net> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Taylor UUCP in large environments Message-ID: <199507111723.NAA18294@ns1.win.net>
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Hey everybody I just finished the conversion of the last SYSV box in the house to FreeBSD. I'm going to yank the plug on it this weekend, after kicking the last of my in-house people off of it. Heh. We will be totally FreeBSD at that point. On the off chance that someone else might be attempting to set up a uucp server for thousands of uucp users it might be worth mentioning the problem that I ran into. If you have a large site your "sys" file can be huge. It takes the taylor subroutines quite a few cycles to parse this file. Each time you invoke uux, uuxqt, uucico, ect this happens. It is sort of like a two pass compilation of the "sys" file for each uucp command. To be fair some of the problem may be our malloc stuff. Naturally this blew my happy 0-1.5 load averages on the target box up to above 11. I made a few judicious patches to Taylor to allow a "default" user, and reduced my "sys" file to about 15 lines. My load averages are back in the happy 0-1.5 range. If anybody is going to do something similar email me for the patches. They are tiny - but critical! It is interesting to note some of the other effects that this conversion has had on throughputs. The old box had an older ethernet card. Our uucp terminal i/o goes through terminal server front ends. We could watch the lights on our stack of modems flash-and-pause, flash-and-pause for jobs on this particular UUCP server. Now the uucp box is running with an EISA version 3c509/P60 and FreeBSD. The modem lights just keep flashing and only pause infrequently. Very nice. So the SYSV era is over for me.....thanks to the FreeBSD guys - and thanks Ian too!! Regards, Mark Hittinger bugs@win.net
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