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From: jim@cs.strath.ac.uk (Jim Reid)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: NNTP or NFS for sharing news?
Message-ID: <JIM.90Jul19175344@baird.cs.strath.ac.uk>
Date: 19 Jul 90 16:53:44 GMT
References: <1990Jul18.233115.25423@phri.nyu.edu>
Sender: jim@cs.strath.ac.uk
Organization: Computer Science Dept., Strathclyde Univ., Glasgow, Scotland.
Lines: 19
In-reply-to: roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu's message of 18 Jul 90 23:31:15 GMT

In article <1990Jul18.233115.25423@phri.nyu.edu> roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:

	   I'm installing C-news for the first time on a Sun file server.  I
   havn't made up my mind yet whether I want to have all the diskless clients
   NFS mount the news spool directory, or if I want them to talk NNTP to the
   server.  I already have rrn running on the clients, using a different
   server, and I'm going to have to support NNTP on this server anyway (for
   news transfer), so it's not a problem of getting the software up.  Given a
   free choice between the two methods, which would you pick?  Is either
   particularly more efficient in terms of CPU time or network bandwidth?

It's probably better to use NNTP than NFS to let clients read news.
News reading causes a lot of recursive directory traversal. It is best
that NFS avoids this sort of thing because it generates large numbers
of NFS requests which will hammer the NFS server... [Compare the load
on the server of running du of /usr/spool/news locally and then trying
it from an NFS client that has mounted this directory....]

		Jim