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Xref: sserve comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:1474 news.software.nntp:13670 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.uwa.edu.au!classic.iinet.com.au!news.uoknor.edu!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!paladin.american.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!news.moneng.mei.com!brasil.moneng.mei.com!not-for-mail From: jgreco@brasil.moneng.mei.com (Joe Greco) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,news.software.nntp Subject: Re: Newspool Date: 26 May 1995 08:39:30 -0500 Organization: Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI Lines: 75 Distribution: inet Message-ID: <3q4lmi$8nm@brasil.moneng.mei.com> References: <3q20eu$vk@airhk.air.org> <3q2524$7ot@brasil.moneng.mei.com> <3q2tur$ffb@agate.berkeley.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: brasil.moneng.mei.com In news.software.nntp article <3q2tur$ffb@agate.berkeley.edu>, jkh@violet.berkeley.edu (Jordan K. Hubbard) wrote: :>just fine.... news.sol.net (FreeBSD 2.0R) has a 7GB news spool, done this : :You must not be taking a very aggressive feed. For news spools, I can :attest from personal experience that 4096/512 is NOT a very good value :and tends to run you out of inodes pretty quick.. A much better value :for a news partition is `-i 1024'. The 2.0.5 installation allows you to :specify newfs parameters on a per-filesystem basis. "not be taking a very aggressive feed"? news.sol.net takes a *full* 20,000+ group Usenet feed. spool.mu.edu is one of the most influential news servers around, according to Brian Reid's statistics. It does not carry some of the regional hierarchies, but carries the rest. While it is not a FreeBSD machine, I used the same techniques to lay it out - and I notice the same average inode/space statistics: Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity iused ifree %iused /dev/dsk/c0t1d0s0 964174 665383 202375 77% 331867 151461 69% /dev/dsk/c0t5d0s0 1969089 1295088 477095 73% 220630 767498 22% (I do not have numbers for news.sol.net handy, but I do check the percentages every few months, and can testify that the numbers are "sufficiently similar"). The first is one of the regular Usenet spool disks. Notice that %iused tracks capacity fairly closely, although there is a small reserve of excess inodes. The second one is the poor little alt.* disk. Here, the standard statistics break down, as expected, with the much larger articles that comprise alt.binaries throwing the statistics significantly. When I set that disk up, I had a bit of a dilemma: I knew it would be better to newfs with default values, but I am hoping to pull alt.binaries off onto another disk at some point down the road, and formatting with 4096/512 would allow me to make such a change without re-newfs'ing this filesystem. However, I really must have missed the boat here. How does the selection of 4096/512 "run you out of inodes pretty quick", given that the block and fragment sizes selected have nothing to do with the number of bytes per inode? I can see a case being made for staying with 8192/1024 if you're silly enough to buy a large disk and you don't want to be able to max out your disk space capacity (and shake the drive to pieces as much... i.e. justify another disk to your boss). Or if it's an alt.binaries partition. But I don't see anybody buying large disks, all the full feed sites that I know of invariably split up the spool over multiple disks (just wait until you have a few hundred nnrpd clients, mid-day)... it's the only way to get reasonable filesystem throughput. Lots of independent heads. Maybe if you don't have dozens of nnrpd clients and sixty nntplinks running, it doesn't matter as much. But I really don't see 8192/1024 as anything more than throwing away some of your expensive disk real estate, unless you're just trying to "hide" some of your disk space to justify that extra disk (I know somebody who did that at one time ;-) ) As for the number of bytes per inode, with the exception of alt.binaries, where the number could actually be tuned *up*, I see no compelling evidence that -i 1024 buys you anything. Do you have a df -i that suggests otherwise?... I've been advising people to do this for years, and I'd be interested to see evidence to the contrary. ;-) Have a good weekend. (P.S. Where is 2.0.5? :-) I'm buying a nice shiny all-new news.sol.net from Rod just so I can run 2.0.5 and avoid some of the random crashes I've had with 2.0R..) ... Joe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joe Greco - Systems Administrator jgreco@ns.sol.net Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI 414/342-4847