INN not keeping up with incoming news

[bill davidsen]

In article <20010213155146.A1520 at opentransit.net> you write:
| According to bill davidsen:

| I'm using hardware RAID under Linux 2.4.1 with 6 * 50GB cycbuffs
| (10 * 36GB disks in a RAID0 array) and history files are in a 9GB RAID1 array.
| I changed to SEQUENTIAL with limited to no success at all.
| 
| INTERLEAVE    article write 14.5% - history write 13.7%
| SEQUENTIAL    article write 12.1% - history write 12.6%

  My gain was because I am still on the older kernel and limited to 2GB
cycbuffs. Using SEQUENTIAL kept the system from thrashing between
cycbuffs. The IBM ServRAID controller has a max stripe of 16k, far too
small for news. I'd love to go to software RAID, but the controller
seems not to support it.

| (cnfsstat behaves strangely with SEQUENTIAL).

  Other than the dates not being the same on cycbuffs, I'm not sure I
see the issue.
| 
| >   Interestingly, the hiswrite is large, but it went down more than the
| > artwrite. Don't understand that one. Still tuning, I want to make the
| > initial article buffer size larger, and see if that helps. My first try
| > broke something, so I have to look at the code a bit more carefully. I
| > have less than 200 streams, so a MB/stream is not an issue for memory,
| > as I usually have at least a GB free (4GB machine).
| 
| I have far less memory on that server (around 1.5 GB) but most of the time,
| only a third is in use. 

  My art/hiswrite dropped from 22-25ms to 14-18ms, idle time went for
<1% to 15-30% (several servers). I'm going to try locking hist cache in
memory if it isn't already, I see no reason why it would page, given 1GB
free memory, but I see no reason not to try it, either!

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.