🚀 go-pugleaf

Question: Has anyone investigated I/O efficient layouts for a
multi-partition news spool directory?

I am using INN 1.2 on Ultrix 4.3 with an RZ57 as my /usr/spool/news.

The disk is doing as many I/Os per second as it can, but the incoming
NNTP feeds are backloged and not catching up noticably.  My solution to
this; split /usr/spool/news over multiple partions.  But this prompts
my question: Has anyone done any investigation into layout policies for
I/O efficient multi-partition news spools?  Any serious speculation or
real world experience?

The reason I think this is an issue is that to read an article via a
sym-link name costs 2 I/Os instead of 1, negating part of the benefit
of using 2 disks.  This tells me that to maximize performance, I must
minimize the number of reads by symlink name.  A good heuristic to
achieve this is to minimize the number of symlinks.

I speculate there is a characteristic of the groups cross-posting
involves and the order the groups are specified that may dictate a
layout preference.

Opinions or experinces..?

Glenn Hollinger,
University of Saskatchewan