Date: Thu, 28 Sep 1995 09:42:04 -0500 (CDT) From: Joe Greco <jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com> To: jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com (Joe Greco) Cc: taob@io.org, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: News Server VM & I/O issues (was: Re: Big win for BSD/OS compatibility) Message-ID: <199509281442.JAA05723@brasil.moneng.mei.com> In-Reply-To: <199509280600.BAA05493@brasil.moneng.mei.com> from "Joe Greco" at Sep 28, 95 01:00:39 am
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> Which leads me to an only-somewhat-related topic. Rod Grimes and I were > having a small side discussion about news server problems as they relate to > disk striping, mirroring, and other similar issues. News servers > traditionally suffer somewhat from the design of UNIX file systems - just > not optimized to deal with a few million small files ;-) and one of the > traditional answers has been to stripe disks, or run multiple spool drives > (like I do). While this helps, it still tends to create "filesystem hot > spots" with no easy and fast solution. I was hoping to throw a striped disk > of some sort at a particular problem I am experiencing. > [....] > (David and John are invited to jump in any time now...) What, if anything, > are other people doing to optimize towards news service? All I am really > doing under 2.0.5R is to bump maxusers to 128. Are there other fun things > to tweak? If I hadn't been half asleep when I wrote this, I would have remembered the other issue I wanted to inject into this... Coming from the Sun world, there are several traditional answers to the types of problems I am having - including both On-Line Disk Suite (a general striping/mirroring/etc package) and PrestoServe (a cache system that effectively gives you the benefits of a journaling filesystem). Having covered OLDS, I forgot about PrestoServe. :-) Has anybody had any wild ideas about trying to throw together some sort of analogue to PrestoServe? I know somebody mentioned a Compaq SCSI(??) controller of some sort that had cache RAM and may or may not have done something somewhat similar, but as memory serves it was an EISA card. This is something we need to consider if we want FreeBSD to be useful in an NFS server environment, and I've often seen PrestoServes added to systems to help increase overall I/O throughput too. ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847
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