Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!att!occrsh!uokmax!servalan!rmtodd
From: rmtodd@servalan.uucp (Richard Todd)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: C inews & rnews speed (was Re: News delivery problems - old news again)
Message-ID: <1989Aug10.051459.613@servalan.uucp>
Date: 10 Aug 89 05:14:59 GMT
References: <43675@bbn.COM> <651@vector.Dallas.TX.US> <1989Aug3.180304.6252@eci386.uucp> <653@vector.Dallas.TX.US> <1989Aug7.230146.274@servalan.uucp> <1989Aug9.042147.10335@utstat.uucp>
Reply-To: rmtodd@servalan.UUCP (Richard Todd)
Organization: Ministry of Silly Walks
Lines: 39

In article <1989Aug9.042147.10335@utstat.uucp> geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) writes:
>Richard Todd:
>> I don't have any good benchmarks on C News vs B News processing of
>> incoming batches, but it seems to take roughly the same amount of time
>> to unpack comparably sized batches of news on servalan and on uokmax (a
>> Multimax running B2.11 News under BSD4.2).
>
>If B news doesn't take at least ten times as much elapsed and CPU time
>as C news to process identical input batches on the same machine, after
>subtracting uncompress or bdecode or uudecode time, then something is
>seriously wrong, possibly with your C news configuration.  Given the
>vast amount of disk i/o performed by B rnews, it just isn't possible
>for B news and properly-configured C news to be even close in running
>times (if it were, we would still be running B news!).

 Well, the machines I looked at are *not* the same; perhaps I should have
been more clear about this.  Uokmax (the B News machine) is a BSD4.2 
machine, whereas servalan (the C News machine) is SVR2, meaning it has
the stock braindead System V filesystem, and the stock 80Meg drive 
Apple supplies is not the world's fastest either.  (Complaints about
the mediocre I/O performance of Apple's Unix are fairly common on 
comp.unix.aux).  From looking at some results of the Musbus benchmarks 
suite, it looks like uokmax has at least a 4 to 1 advantage over servalan
as far as disk I/O goes.  (One might also note that servalan does *not*
run the replacement stdio library routines provided with C News; as I
pointed out some time back, said replacement routines don't work 
properly under A/UX.)  Anyway, given the fairly hefty advantages the B
News machine had on its side in this comparison, I'm satisfied in the 
performance of C News.  The point of my original article was not to
give a rigorous comparison, but merely to point out that C News had
reasonable performance under normal use (unpacking incoming batches),
and that the slow performance of the 300 separate inews invocations is
not representative of C News as a whole.  
  Anyone out there done any more rigorous tests of C News vs B News 
performance? 
--
Richard Todd	rmtodd@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu  rmtodd@chinet.chi.il.us
	rmtodd@servalan.uucp
Motorola Skates On Intel's Head!