Autzoo.893
gripes
utzoo!henry
Sun Aug 16 21:39:34 1981
news performance...
There basically are two reasons why news (both reading and sending) is
so slow.  One is that the news program was never really designed to cope
with an articles database of the size it is currently managing: a design
defect.  The other is that news processing involves a lot of disk activity
high up on the disk, an area that gets poor service unless the system is
COMPLETELY idle.  News is actually fairly fast on a totally idle system,
but other system activity hits news much harder than it hits, say, ed.
This is mostly a result of all disk activity going through one set of heads.

News response Friday evening was particularly bad because just then the
news system was busy processing Wednesday night's network traffic (which
had been on hold due to downtime).  This also explains "locked up" messages;
the problem that causes these is a side effect of the slowness.

There is no dispute that the current performance of news is unacceptable.
A full remedy for this is not easy.  I am pursuing several approaches to
the problem;  there should be some improvement soon.