Xref: utzoo news.sysadmin:3753 news.software.b:7730 comp.unix.aix:5063 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!bu.edu!wang!fitz From: fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) Newsgroups: news.sysadmin,news.software.b,comp.unix.aix Subject: Re: IBM RS/6000 unsuitable for news Message-ID: Date: 13 May 91 21:14:43 GMT References: <1991May6.181144.23900@zoo.toronto.edu> <1F7k22w164w@halcyon.uucp> <1991May8.191430.6864@nmt.edu> Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA, USA Lines: 40 > In article <1F7k22w164w@halcyon.uucp> halcyon!ralphs@seattleu.edu (Ralph Sims) writes: > >In an earlier post I mentioned that the average MS-DOS filesize for news > >articles appeared to be ~3K. Using a 4K blocksize would be fairly efficient > >under that condition. nraoaoc@nmt.edu (NRAO Array Operations Center) writes: > Not if you have hundreds of tiny articles and a few giant ones which skew the > average. Which is indeed the case. Most articles are less than 1536 bytes. From a snapshot of the news here: size # articles cumulative ---------- ---------- ---------- 1-512: 832 832 513-1024: 8551 9383 1025-1536: 10069 19452 1537-2048: 6139 25591 2049-2560: 3301 28892 2561-3072: 1699 30591 3073-3584: 1052 31643 3585-4096: 734 32377 4097-4608: 468 32845 4609-5120: 316 33161 5121-5632: 192 33353 5633-infinite: 1513 34866 mean: 2603 bytes median: 1300-1400 bytes, or somewhere around there A 4K block size wastes about 40% of the disk. Take my word for it, that's what we're running here. It depends a LOT on the flavor of the newsfeed, too. Articles in talk.*, rec.* and soc.* have a smaller median size than articles in comp.* and news.*. Moderated groups have larger articles than non-moderated groups. --- Tom Fitzgerald Wang Labs fitz@wang.com 1-508-967-5278 Lowell MA, USA ...!uunet!wang!fitz