C news on a 3B1/7300 (or B news with mdbm)

[Chris Lewis]

In article <22843 at ditka.UUCP> kls at ditka.UUCP (Karl Swartz) writes:
| In article <647 at magnus.Hotline.Com> levin at magnus.Hotline.Com (Michael M Levin) writes:
| >In article <22541 at ditka.UUCP> I write:
| >>Could someone tell me how to get C news up on one of these machines
| 
| >	It's a pain in the rear end, and it seems too big and clunky for a
| >	little 'ole 3B1.
| 
| Urk?  I thought C news was supposed to be ever so much faster than
| B news, and thus should be better for a little 'ole 3B1?!
| 
| >>If C news isn't feasible, what about B news with mdbm? 
| 
| Well, a neighbor (scott at zorch.sf-bay.org) sent me dbz 1.9, and I
| built B news 2.11.14 with that.
| 
| With that, news is running happily and swiftly.

ecicrl (at 3b1) is running B-news 2.11.19 with absolutely no changes whatsover
(except for the well known 2.11.19 batcher bug) using the B-news 2.11
built-in multiple file history support (/usr/lib/news/history.d/*[0-9]).
Eg: no dbm/sdbm/dbz/ndbm/mdbm whatsoever.

And runs quite happily and swiftly.  Even when catching up on 8 or
more Mb of news in one continuous UUCP slurp.

As it did with 2.11.14.

Admittedly, ecicrl doesn't receive a full USENET feed, but it's history files
are very large because I keep a month's worth of expiry information, and
there's a *lot* of internal news traffic (400K+/day).

My nightly news management script has 5 or 6 full B-news expire passes,
they take, in total, about 10-20 minutes.

Mind you, 8Mb of news *in* plus three outgoing feeds has my modem 
utilized >12 hours/day.  And my disk throttles working overtime....

The moral: in B-news, on System V, unless you have a dbm package already 
around, use the B-news multiple-file history.  It works quite nicely and
you don't have to muck with the code in any way.

The overhead of B-news is *not* DBM lookup, it's the reforking of rnews
on each *article*.  That's where C-news gets its main speed increment 
from.  The main problem with C-news is that it's history mechanism for
those times when you *don't* have a DBM is considerably slower than B-new's
non-DBM solution.  A C-news site next to ours (a biggish 3b2) was brought 
up without dbz, it ran about 4 articles/minute.  My piddly little 3b1 
without dbm was running about 15 or more articles/minute.  Without dbz
even a biggish 3b2 cannot keep up to a fullish feed, but I have no
doubt that my 3b1 running vanilla 2.11.19 could (except for modems and
disk space ;-)

But, *nothing* I've seen yet can beat a C-news site with a proper DBM.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Elegant Communications Inc, {uunet!attcan,utzoo}!lsuc!eci386!clewis
Ferret mailing list: eci386!ferret-list, psroff mailing list: eci386!psroff-list