Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!solace!nntp.uio.no!news.cais.net!news.jsums.edu!gatech!newsfeed.internetmci.com!uunet!not-for-mail From: lnz@dandelion.com (Leonard N. Zubkoff) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,news.admin.technical,news.software.nntp Subject: Re: Poor performance with INN and FreeBSD. Date: 9 Apr 1996 16:36:04 -0400 Organization: Dandelion Digital Lines: 27 Sender: zorch@ftp.UU.NET Approved: zorch@uunet.UU.NET Distribution: world Message-ID: <4kea27$6f0@kelewan.dandelion.com> References: <311F8C62.4BC4@pluto.njcc.com> <4go23v$8hp@fozzie.sun3.iaf.nl> <DpHI0o.2A6@unixhub.SLAC.Stanford.EDU> NNTP-Posting-Host: ftp.uu.net Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:16978 news.admin.technical:1395 news.software.nntp:21492 In article <DpHI0o.2A6@unixhub.SLAC.Stanford.EDU> kls@MAILBOX.SLAC.Stanford.EDU (Karl L. Swartz) writes: [snip snip] Who said anything about striped filesystems? True striping is foolish for news anyway -- it's forte is with large files, exactly the opposite of what you see with news. For news you'd want concatenation, and in that case it's generally pretty easy to add another disk. Right now I'm using Sun's OnLine:DiskSuite and adding a disk is trivial. You'll still get better performance than one larger disk, though not for one individual article. [My experience with concatenation vs. striping is at a variance with Karl's statement. Jerry Aguirre has posted on this issue in the past, and the upshot seems to be that striping does indeed work better for news. --mod] Indeed, striping for news is a win if done properly. You do not want concatenation. Consider a 14GB news spool composed of 7 2GB disks that's only 85% full. With a concentated file system, a random I/O load will be spread only across the first 6 disks since file systems will generally optimize for locality. If we stripe those 7 disks instead, we are guaranteed to be spreading the random I/O load across all the spindles. The key point is to make sure the stripe width is set large enough that the typical I/O transaction only needs to access one of the 7 drives. Leonard