On Fri, 13 Sep 1996, John D. Smerdon wrote:

> Are there configuration options that would increase disk performance?  I
> have a news server that can not sustain two articles per second and it is
> starting to fall behind.  It usually takes from 200-800ms after receiving
> an article before it is written to disk and an acknowledgement (235?) is
> sent.
[lots of stats cut]

One thing you failed to mention was the size of your history database.
Since the history database is a DBM format file and has to be referenced
often, INN stores the *whole* database in memory.. which means that if
your database is larger than the amount of available memory on the
machine, it has to swap out to the disk as it searches through the
database which means slow returns and lots of paging... And since the disk
is paging, it takes time to write articles to the disk.

In general, it's best to go 1.5 times the size of your history database.
This means if you have a 128MB database, you should go to 196 MB of ram
minimally.

Melody

Melody Lynn Yoon        Systems Administration          melody@voicenet.com
"Our children know everything... We have cable." -- Charles in Charge
Member of Team Internet Paintball -- I just forget my ID #
PGP Key: finger -l melody@voicenet.com