🚀 go-pugleaf

cimshop!davidm@uunet.UU.NET (David S. Masterson) writes:

> Date: 25 Sep 92 22:32:51 GMT
> Organization: Consilium Inc., Mountain View, California

> The general consensus around here is that NNTP allows for better performance
> monitoring and control of news reading than NFS.  We run our news connection
> to the outside world on a SUN-3 and that system would be severely taxed if it
> had to handle NFS demands from within the company as well as unwind the news
> batches from UUNET.  NNTP requests have been much more palatable for this
> system and the priority of NNTP can be set down if too many people are reading
> the news.

And, as I mentioned in a previous reply, if the *only* purpose of
NFS on the server is to support news readings, you can also reduce
the priority of nfsd processes.

I am getting the impression that a lot depends on the configuration.
E.g. my experience is that having a Sun-3 export disks via NFS to
*much faster* workstations, e.g. SPARCStations, can put a much
larger load on the machine and the network than if the clients were
better matched to the server. Perhaps it seems to have something to
do with the frequency of failed attempts to contact the server when
the server is busy?

It seems to me from all the comments so far that the only way to
find out what works well is to try various options, and the results
will depend on the configuration and the number of simultaneous news
users. In my department the news system is used by a relatively
small number of people at any one time, so I would like to maximise
its functionality for them.

Aaron
-- 
Aaron Sloman, School of Computer Science,
The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, England
EMAIL   A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk
Phone: +44-(0)21-414-3711       Fax:   +44-(0)21-414-4281