At 1:17 AM +0100 2000/3/23, FREENIX IS OVERRATED wrote:
> Without really tuning anything, after a bit of time, the time needed
> to do history lookups drops to microseconds, and as long as a `sync'
> isn't needed, innd doesn't get stuck. Theoretically, a sync, where
> you are in fact seeking rather wildly over the disk to update these
> files, happens once a day at expiry. Depending on the speed of the
> drive (and I haven't optimized this at all, using a single drive for
> OS, logs, history, and part of spool, with a second drive for the rest
> of the spool, far from an ideal setup), this seems to mean only a
> few minutes of downtime. Actually building the new .index and .hash
> files goes quite a bit faster, like by a factor of 3 to 4, so clearly
> the update of these files during the `sync' could stand improved sorting.
There are those of us running Diablo that solve this sort of
problem on our main news peering servers by having the entire history
file stored on a memory-based filesystem, so that we can sustain
1000-2000 history lookups per second.
Obviously, this solution is not scalable to news spool servers,
because you can't afford to lose the history file for a months worth
of news, but the current mmap() based solution for the indexes of the
history database seems to cause much more disk accesses than I would
like to see.
Perhaps this would be a good application for md?
--
These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy
======================================================================
Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> || Belgacom Skynet SA/NV
Systems Architect, Mail/News/FTP/Proxy Admin || Rue Colonel Bourg, 124
Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.13.11/12.49 || B-1140 Brussels
http://www.skynet.be || Belgium
To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
