Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!brtmac From: brtmac@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu (Brett McCoy) Newsgroups: news.software.nntp Subject: Re: NNTP or NFS for sharing news? Message-ID: <1990Jul20.080652.533@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu> Date: 20 Jul 90 08:06:52 GMT References: <1990Jul18.233115.25423@phri.nyu.edu> Sender: news@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu (The News Guru) Organization: Kansas State University Lines: 50 In hirai@cs.swarthmore.edu (Eiji Hirai) writes: >At our site, we mount /var/spool/news via nfs [also running nn 6.4.9, rn >patchlevel 47 and cnews 25-May-1990]. However, I'm sort of convinced that I >should make my newsreaders read news via nntp now. >There are couple of things that make me hesitate though: >1) Is there any overhead in having multiple nntp processes on the server >running? We have a lot of news reading folk on our network and I assume >(naively without looking at code) that each nntp news reader will have their >own nntp process on the server. Our server only has 28M of memory. At our site we have a SPARCStation 1 as our news server. I has 16 meg of memory and also acts as the system fileserver for 4 other SS-1's. The SS-1 is not short on horsepower, but it does tend to run short on memory. With nfs I have 4 nfs daemon's running all the time and handling all of the load. With nntp there is a separate nntp daemon for each person reading news. This causes more memory to be consumed which causes more paging and a general decrease in system performance. I very rarely see the nfs daemons using a noticible chunk of the processor, only when people are logging on to the diskless clients or are editing big files and running large programs. I do notice nntp daemons running high up on the top list and chewing up a sizable chunk of memory. Since news reading tends to be get an article, pause while reading, get another, pause, etc., it stands to reason that a few nfs daemons can service a lot of people more efficiently then a bunch of nntp daemons that try to stay paged in all of the time even though they really aren't very busy. >2) I noticed a significant drop in response time when I read news via rrn >compared to when I read news via nfs mounted /var/spool/news. Is this >general or was it just my case? One major reason for a decrease in response time while using nntp is that it seems to be a ack every packet type of system. When transmitting an article to the client the server sends a packet, waits for an ack from the client and then sends the next packet. There is no windowing that can be seen from monitoring the net. NFS uses windowing to increase trasmission speed. I have noticed this on every system I have used. >-- >Eiji Hirai @ Mathematics Dept., Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081-1397 >hirai@cs.swarthmore.edu | hirai@swarthmr.bitnet | uunet!hirai%cs.swarthmore.edu >Copyright 1990 by Eiji Hirai. All Rights Reserved. Permission to reproduce or >quote explicitly denied except on Usenet. I don't speak for Swarthmore College. -- Too bad the universe doesn't run in a segmented environment with protected memory. -- Wiz from "Wizards Bane" by Rick Cook Brett McCoy | Kansas State University brtmac@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu | UseNet news manager.