On Wed, 24 Jun 1998, William T Wilson wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Jun 1998, Shawn McMahon wrote:
>
> > 56k won't cut it. Last time I checked, 128k would, but I wouldn't be
> > surprised if it's gone past that now.
>
> I don't think you have. A full newsfeed is up over 10GB per day. It
> requires almost a full T-1 just to carry the news. Over half of this is
> alt.binaries.
>
> It really seems to have ballooned. A year ago a full feed was only 4GB
> per day.
I would use the word "explosion" over "balloon"!
>
> > More importantly, however, will your hard drives cut it? A single big,
> > fast drive won't. 2 probably won't.
>
> No, drives are rarely the issue. If you had one 25GB drive (suboptimal),
> or 4+ 8GB drives (more optimal), you wouldn't be hurting. Those disk
> caches these days are just amazing. :)
Not true. Even with the new CNFS in INN 2.X you would still *greatly*
benefit from plenty of small fast hard drives in a RAID0 array over one
large one.
>
> > The big news servers run with many small drives striped, and you're better
> > off if the history file is on multiple spindles that aren't also doing
> > something else.
>
> I don't think the history file benefits so much from being on a striped
> disk. The news spool itself certainly does.
True. The history file should be on a separate partition from the
articles and overview though, at a minimum. The big issues are the
articles spool and the overview. Put the articles on a single large
striped array, and the overview on a separate partition or a separate
striped array. For the best performance, logging should also be on a
separate partition.
>
> > BTW, older versions of INN supposedly can't even handle the volume even
> > with fast hardware, but I can't confirm this, having never run it on
> > sufficient hardware with a full feed. I suspect the figures may be
> > bogus, since they came from sales people for a commercial news server
> > product.
>
> They are bogus. Modern INN is much more efficient than old INN, but if
> you have a relatively recent INN, you'll do fine. Be sure you make the
> appropriate tweaks to your kernel (file handles and all that) and format
> your disks with lots of extra inodes (for all the symbolic links).
>
I agree absolutely. INN 2.0 incorporates some fantastic technologies
(CNFS, timehashing, and article caching are all great examples). If you
want to use older tried and true tech, try INN1.72.in.sync (Chris Dent
keeps a GREAT RPMed version with hundreds of tweaks and all the in.sync
patches, the perl hooks, ready for Clean Sweep spam filtering, etc.)
However, I strongly recommend INN 2.0.
VAResearch has some great news servers that ship preconfigured with RAID0,
fast drives, INN 2.0 with source, etc. We have been benchmarking one for
a while now, and it is *FAST*.
> Don't forget: sufficiently fast hardware makes all problems go away.
> That's the Microsoft credo, and there is some truth to it :)
Some truth, but not when it comes to truly demanding applications like
Usenet News. Here you need all three: a proper OS and efficient
well-written software in addition to great hardware.
>
>
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