Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!kuhub.cc.ukans.edu!anu-news!list From: TLIMONCE@DRUNIVAC.BITNET (Tom Limoncelli@ Drew Univ.) Newsgroups: news.software.anu-news Subject: A New Topic -- Tuning News Message-ID: Date: 28 Oct 89 19:09:00 GMT Sender: ANU-NEWS Discussion Reply-To: "Tom Limoncelli@ Drew Univ." Lines: 39 Original_To: ANUNEWS I would like to start a discussion on how to tune news so that it is as fast as possible when starting up. Currently it takes about 3-4 minutes to start. When we get 90-100 users on-line, it goes up to 8-10 minutes. Neither are reasonable. I understand that eventually it will be brought up to almost no time at all, but while we're waiting there must be a bunch of "do"s and "don't"s. Let me tell you about my system. VAX 6330 VMS 5.1-1 ANU NEWS v5.9A We have about 400 newsgroups. About 300 are very inactive. 77 of them are fed from Bitnet mailing lists. The rest are empty and unused (we have one for each course being offered, whether requested or not). We are about to start receiving a full Usenet newsfeed, what will add another 400 newsgroups at least. (Yea DECUS UUCP!) All news is stored on a fast drive (not sure of model number) which basically has no other activity. We run a defragment program on the disk. I can certainly feel it when the defrag isn't running, performance drops. So, Tom's first tip: get a defragmentor program. We've initialized the disk with a cluster-size of 1. Does anyone have any advice? What's the general feeling on how this is set up? A while ago someone posted tips for parameters that Geoff should use when opening files, etc but I don't know if they were implemented. Any news for 5.9B? -Tom --- Tom Limoncelli -- tlimonce@drunivac.Bitnet -- limonce@pilot.njin.net Drew University -- Box 1060, Madison, NJ -- 201-408-5389 :) Standard Disclaimer: I am not the mouth-piece of Drew University (: "DEC's All-In-1 isn't completely useless, but it's a nice attempt."