nnrpd, cnfs and binaries

[Donald Roeber]

> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:
>
> > bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> writes:
> >
> > > Typically the startup is much faster with -D and the memory used 
> is less
> > > due to the data being shared COW for most functional VM 
> implementations.
> > > Obviously YMMV.
> >
> > I don't think -D helps that much there because most of the memory 
> usage is
> > from opening the storage and overview backends, and that's done 
> after the
> > fork even in -D mode.
> >
>
> If you're just using "safe" backends (CNFS and tradindexed), you can
> hoist the SetupDaemon call (which is what we've done); without this we
> really struggle to keep up with the page mapping which happens at
> startup (large CNFS bitmaps being the main area).
>
> The other thing we have (which I still haven't found time to commit)
> is pre-forking which helps lots - we have a big peak at 6pm (the UK's
> traditional cheap rate call time) when we see high connect rates after
> which it takes a couple of hours to repopulate the server pool.

So I finally was able to get back to this problem.  As a test, I've 
enabled overchan, zeroed out the existing overview buffers, and rebuild 
the overview and history databases.  When the rebuilding of the 
databases was complete, I was able to see all of the articles posted 
before I throttled innd and rebuild the databases with my newsreader.  
So that's good.  However, articles posted since then aren't being seen 
with my newsreader.  So that's not good.   Articles are coming into the 
system, and being stored.  I've verified this with grephistory and sm.

As far as I can tell, we're not running low on any system resources on 
this system.  I can't run nnrpd out of inetd, because we only want to 
listen for newsreader connections on a particular IP address, and 
refuse them on any of the other addresses the system is known by.

Anyone have any other ideas?  Once I get this problem fixed, I can 
finally put this server into production.

-- 
Donald Roeber
ISC Networking