🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4364@mhres.mh.nl> jv@mh.nl (right, that's me) wrote:

> I have about 60,000 articles on-line, and my history files (I
> have SystemV "history.d/[0-9]" files) total up to about 4Mb.
> I'm considering to use dbm in the news software, hoping this will
> speed things up. I rebuilt the dbm history file, which grew to
> more than 8 Mb in size. Is this normal? 

I've got three types of responses.

 1. All kinds of people explained me the nature of dbm files (sparse
    files). Nevertheless, the "more than 8 Mb" were *REAL* Mbytes
    occupied.
 2. I was assured that 2.5 times the size of the history file is quite
    normal for the dbm files. 
 3. Suggestions to improve news system performance:
    - Use 'dbz' instead of 'dbm'. This package, written by Jon Zeeff
      <zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us>, implements a fast 'dbm' subset
      especially for the NetNews software. This was advised by a
      number of people (including Jon Zeeff himself).
    - Use 'Cnews' instead of 'Bnews'. Better still: use 'Cnews' with
      'dbz'. This was also advised by a number of people (not
      including the authors of Cnews), promising 2 to 20 times more
      performance.

What I did? I added 'dbz' to 'Bnews', and added the 'SPOOLNEWS' option
(my machine is running short on memory). Now it feels 50-100% faster.
I tried 'Cnews', but ran into problems I could not cope with in the
relativily small amount of time I allocated to solve the news
performance problems. Building Cnews is rather straighforward, but
installing it proved rather complex. I missed the possibility to
install a 'shadow' news system aside of Bnews. The documentation
states that this is possible, since all news tools obey a series of
environment variables. However, I could not get it to work properly.
Maybe I try again some other time.

Everyone who has sent responses to me: thanks a lot!

Johan
--
Johan Vromans				       jv@mh.nl via internet backbones
Multihouse Automatisering bv		       uucp: ..!{uunet,hp4nl}!mh.nl!jv
Doesburgweg 7, 2803 PL Gouda, The Netherlands  phone/fax: +31 1820 62944/62500
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