Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!neat.ai.toronto.edu!lamy
From: lamy@ai.utoronto.ca (Jean-Francois Lamy)
Subject: Re: Cnews performance?
Message-ID: <89Jun23.003815edt.11717@neat.ai.toronto.edu>
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 89 00:38:10 EDT

I think that a lot of things are done in the input subsystem in a
general, but inefficient way.  For example, all your UUCP feeds may
come in in the same format; testing each batch to see what format
it is in is clearly wasted, especially if the test involves starting
a process like compress only to see it fail...

We just bypass the input subsystem; we use an lpr queue that calls relaynews.
Our newsrun just runs lpr on the files, and only nntpd ever calls it.	The
"rnews" called by UUCP just does an lpr.  Our feeds from mailing lists just
does minimal header munging and calls lpr too, bypassing inews.

The gains in running C news are as follows, I think:
- fast relaynews
- faster expire
- easily customizable inews (though some parts should be done in C -- the
  search for moderators comes to mind).

The trick is to look at what your input batches are like and to get them
to relaynews asap.  In other words, trim your sails.

Jean-Francois Lamy               lamy@ai.utoronto.ca, uunet!ai.utoronto.ca!lamy
AI Group, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4