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From: brtmac@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu (Brett McCoy)
Newsgroups: news.software.nntp
Subject: Re: How much of a load is nntp?
Message-ID: <1990Nov18.173733.21964@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu>
Date: 18 Nov 90 17:37:33 GMT
References: <1990Nov15.155532.3384@ssd.kodak.com> <1990Nov16.220048.22474@engin.umich.edu> <1990Nov17.054512.13632@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu> <1990Nov18.035402.11348@decuac.dec.com>
Sender: news@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu (The News Guru)
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In <1990Nov18.035402.11348@decuac.dec.com> mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum) writes:

>Brett McCoy writes:

>>Something most people forget about here is the memory involved.  Each nntp
>>connection requires that an nntpd process be running.  If the client is even
>>moderately busy this involves several hundred K worth of memory being devoted
>>to the nntpd, which is several hundred K lost to any other process trying to
>>run.

>	I assume you don't waste any of your memory with abominations like
>X-window, then. :)

>	Hmmm... if your system is groaning from too many read-only nntp
>connections from rrn, I suppose you could switch to reading articles via
>NFS. I doubt you'd save much, though.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't run nntpd, but the question was raised
about how much of an impact it puts on system performance.  I took it as
meaning what will be the difference between a system running without any
nntpd's and a system running with nntpd's.  CPU wise there is very little
difference, but when you take everything else into account, there is
a performance impact.  The difference between a system running X and one
that isn't is also pretty large, but I put up with it.  :-)

Most of the news reading done here is through NFS.  It is generally faster
and since nfsd's are always running and the disk gets acessed one way or the
other, I feel that using nfs to read news is better than using nntp.  Less
resources in the way of memory, context switching, etc. being used.
--
When an eel bites your leg, and the pain makes you beg, that's a moray!
If I spent as much time on my classes as I do reading news, I'd graduate.
Brett McCoy			Computing and Telecommunications Activities
brtmac@maverick.ksu.ksu.edu	Kansas State University