Feed problem

[Brennon Church]

Hello,

I'm trying to trace down a problem where one of my news system is unable to
accept a full news feed (150G/day +).  I'm running the 20000715 snapshot of
inn-2.4.0 on a FreeBSD 4.0 stable box.  I'm using cycbuffs with no
overview.

In watching the output from netstat, I can see that the incoming sockets
are spending most of their time full or near full.  That would seem to
indicate to me that the local system (my machine) isn't able to pick up the
data fast enough.  I'm thinking this would have to do with one of three
things, processor, ram, or hard disk.

The processor is a PIII 800 at 133Mhz, so it should be plenty fast enough.
Additionally, top shows that it usually hovers around 40% to 50%  idle, with 
innd taking up an average 25% to 30%, and innfeed taking up between 2% and 
5%.

The ram is all running at 133mhz, and I have a total of 768M of it.  Top
tells me that innd is running at ~140M total, and ~60M resident.

There are two drives in the system, one 4gig boot drive, and a 50gig spool
drive.  The system is transit only, so retention isn't an issue.  Watching
a systat iostat, I see that the transfers per second go between 50 and 100,
and the MB/s is about 1.5 to 1.7.

Does anyone have any experience with a similar problem?  Or are there any
ideas on what I might be missing in this whole thing.  I've done a
significant amount of testing, so let me know if I need to expand upon
anything I've mentioned here.

On a side note... What is about the average size for a full news feed
nowadays.  I've managed to get up to 152Gigs in a day, but I'm usually
hovering around 140 or so.

--Brennon Church
System Administrator
CTSnet Internet Services