🚀 go-pugleaf

In news.software.b, article <1992Dec18.135727.4601@sonyd1.Broadcast.Sony.COM>,
  lilb@sony.compuserve.com (Bruce Lilly) writes:
> 
> Does innd have to be running continuously, or can it be run on an
> as-required basis from inetd (suitable for machines with low
> volume feeds and only occasional newsreader connections (nntpd
> can be run from inetd))?
> 
When innd is not active, it gets mostly paged out. So there shouldn't be any
performance degradation when innd is running and doing nothing.

On the other hand, innd startup takes a few CPU seconds (grab the history
file, scan the newsfeeds file, build all the in-core data structures).
Besides, inetd can't listen on UNIX-domain sockets and innd doesn't have a
way to pass an open file descriptor in (other than the TCP listener socket,
which can only be opened as root under most Unixes).

> What other underlying assumptions and requirements exist for
> INN? For example, somebody else claimed that because INN can
> write to a pipe rather than to a disk file, it's performance can
> be better than C news'.  That assumes that a pipe is
> fundamentally different from a disk file, which is certainly not
> the case for many varieties of the UNIX(R) operating system.

Umm, that depends on what you regard as "fundamentally different".
Read/write froma pipe usually doesn't hit the disk at all, you don't
have to scan a directory and open/close a file every time the reader
catches up with the writer, you can't call select() on a disk file...

> Aside from a socket emulation library, what does INN require
> (does it require BSD-hacked signal(3) calls, e.g.)?
> 
INN doesn't really depend on signals. It uses them to catch SIGC(H)LD and
SIGPIPE, to find out when a piped-to process dies or closes its stdin,
and to shut down gracefully when it gets SIGINT or SIGTERM.
None of these depend on BSD signal semantics.

-- 
The clothes have no emperor.
- C. A. Hoare, about Ada.
-- 
Matthias Urlichs  --  urlichs@smurf.sub.org -- urlichs@smurf.ira.uka.de   /(o\
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