*BSD News Article 80847


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From: cfanning@jingoro.prevmed.sunysb.edu (Chris Fanning)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: FreeBSD as news-server??
Date: 15 Oct 1996 12:22:52 -0400
Organization: University at Stony Brook
Lines: 29
Message-ID: <540dos$asu@jingoro.prevmed.sunysb.edu>
References: <537ddl$3cc@amd40.wecs.org> <53ott7$579@adv.IAEhv.nl> <53pm5c$5ks@twwells.com> <53u1ic$61i@flash.noc.best.net> <53ucuj$8qh@twwells.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: jingoro.prevmed.sunysb.edu
X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2]

T. William Wells (bill@twwells.com) wrote:
: Before I get into this, one thing I don't recall being mentioned,
: so I'll mention it just in case: be sure to compile the kernel on
: your news machine to allow lots of open files and lots of child
: processes. Otherwise, you _will_ run out of resources.....

[ lots of good arguments regarding C-News and INN deleted ]

I'm assuming these numbers are on BSD.  One thing that I've been wondering
is why I'm getting such slow performance writing articles.  A few years ago
I had Linux on this machine and I could get [write] 40 articles/sec.  This
is on a 486/66 with 16MB of RAM.  And, no, this certainly was not a full
newsfeed!

Doing roughly the same thing today on a P133 with 64MB RAM with FreeBSD I
get a peak of 10 art/sec.

I was running INN on both machines - 1.4sec I believe.  The only behavior
that I know of that's very different between Linux and FreeBSD is that
Linux by default does asynchronous writes when creating directory entries.
Since this is a big part of a newsfeed, has anyone tried turning off the
synced writes on FreeBSD and does it improve performance?

If it does, it would be really nice if there was some command to run that
could turn synced writes on and off.  I don't get a continuous feed, it runs
nightly.  It would be nice to turn them off, get my articles, and then turn
synced writes back on.

Chris