INN not keeping up with incoming news

[Fabien Tassin]

According to bill davidsen:
> 
>   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.

Same problem with my HP NetRAID controler but the default strip size if 64KB
and max is 128KB (need 8 MB on the card).

> | (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!

idle is always >60% here. art/hiswrite avg is around 8ms but I assume hiswrite
should be lower than 3ms (3.827/8.240/20.995ms today). It's not easy to locate
bottlenecks on production servers so I'll write a tool to bench the history
code separately once it will be in a lib with an API.

-- 
Fabien Tassin -+- fta at sofaraway.org