IBM RS/6000 unsuitable for news

Jeff Smith jeffs at soul.esd.sgi.com
Tue May 7 11:17:46 AEST 1991


In <1991May6.181144.23900 at zoo.toronto.edu> henry at zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes:

>In article <BGLENDEN.91May6130729 at colobus.cv.nrao.edu> bglenden at colobus.cv.nrao.edu (Brian Glendenning) writes:
>>A quickie shell script tells me that:
>>(total size in 4k blocks)/(total # of bytes in files) = 2.0
>>On a Sun with 1k blocks the number is 1.2.
>>This ignores the role of fragments, which I would have thought would
>>go a long way to saving the day for AIX...

>Do remember that the Sun is quoting space used in KB.  If AIX is being asked
>to quote space usage in 4K blocks, quite plausibly it is rounding file sizes
>up to multiples of 4K.  Make sure this is really a space-consumption problem
>rather than just a reporting problem.

Well I'm not sure if bglenden's numbers are correct, but his conclusions are
correct--the JFS (AIX filesystem) uses a 4KB blocksize, and does not do
fragmentation (ala BSD FFS).  This makes undesirable for a netnews server.


jeffs at sgi.com						(former RS/6000 user.)
"Let's get SWIZin!"



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