Folks,
  I need to build a large news server.  The current machine, a Sparc20/71 with
384mb RAM and disks spread out on their own dedicated SCSI busses, is a
wonderful machine but it's getting overwhelmed with the traffic.  It's running
NetBSD/sparc v1.3.2 with some hacks for directly mmap()ing block devices.  The
news software in question is INN v2.1.

  I'm considering an Alphaserver 4100 running NetBSD as a next step.  As I
have no experience with NetBSD on that particular machine, I have a few
concerns.  First and foremost, I need to know if it's stable enough to use in a
commercial production environment.  Second, though nearly equally important, is
the issue of performance.  I know the '4100 is a damn quick machine...Does
NetBSD "do the right thing" on that hardware?  Is it realistic to expect to
shove a few PCI ethernet or FDDI adapters into the box and squirt very
high-volume news feeds out of them?  How about low-latency raw disk access?

  Further, I'm not married to the idea of a '4100...if someone can recommend a
system better suited to such an application in a similar price range, I'm all
ears.

  I've been successful in keeping my company's production operations 100%
NetBSD, and when I need to build a big, fast system, I usually go with big
sparcs...but this time I need something a little bigger than that, and I want
to keep it NetBSD...Thanks for any advice you can give.


                           -Dave McGuire