🚀 go-pugleaf

davidg@aegis.or.jp (Dave McLane) writes:

> Putting the news on second 330MB ESDI hard disk made some
> improvement, but not much. Putting the system on a 486 33MHz made
> some improvement, but not much.

Our configuration is much like yours, Dave.  We found the greatest
improvement was to be had by going to a faaaaast SCSI drive.  The ESDI drive
was NOT an improvement.

Another thing that lead to some improvement, but not much, was to "nice" the
news unbatching process.  The hard drives still grind, and I/O is still the
major bottleneck on the system, but the users can get in there while the
unbatching is happening, and nobody complains about slowness.

A typical Unix performance problem caused by placing active partitions at
opposite (or at least near-opposite) sides of a disk.  That kind of
configuration causes a lot of unecessary overhead as the disk heads spend
all their time seeking and less time actually doing reads/writes.  Of
course, the news is so large that it will cover most of the disk anyway!

--
Tony Shepps  toad@cellar.org
Preferred address:  toad%cellar@tredysvr.tredydev.unisys.com
Snail mail:  P.O. Box 655, Blue Bell, PA  19422
Public access and thoughtful conversation:  The Cellar BBS  +1 215 654 9184