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- Newsgroups: comp.sys.novell
- Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!bogus.sura.net!darwin.sura.net!sol.ars-grin.gov!dbmuke
- From: dbmuke@sol.ars-grin.gov (Kurt Endress)
- Subject: Re: Novell 3.11 as NFS Unix News Server
- Message-ID: <C03H9z.1I7@sol.ars-grin.gov>
- Organization: USDA - Agricultural Research Service
- References: <1992Dec29.183823.2854@amiserv.chi.il.us>
- Date: Wed, 30 Dec 1992 23:01:11 GMT
- Lines: 35
-
- In article <1992Dec29.183823.2854@amiserv.chi.il.us> brianv@amiserv.chi.il.us (Brian Vargyas) writes:
- >I've got a interesting question regarding performance and memory using 3.11
- >as a NFS news server. Recently, I set up 3.11 with a 600MB Disk and NFS V1.2
- >and 16MB ram. I added NFS Name space and was going to use it as a News server
- >for several unix systems on the net as well as a DOS server. Well, the 600MB
- >disk had to move to another machine for a reason, and a 1.7GM Maxtor drive
- >was replaced into the 3.11 Server. I've just started to use the Maxtor with
- >the NFS news and DOS stuff. I still only have 16MB ram, and I calculated
- >22MB was required. What will happen in this situation if I don't add more
- >memory? Will NFS eventually run out of memory? Even if I put in 22MB
- >of ram..will all those TONS of little news files do anything bad to the memory?
-
- We had over 2 Gigs of disk on a 3.11 server with only 16 Megs of RAM.
- When I first did the calculations it seemed that we were using more
- memory than we had. Then I noticed that the drives/volumes were
- formatted with 8 KB blocks instead of the standard 4 KB blocks. This
- halves the memory required by the name space.
-
- If you are using 8 KB blocks you might want to consider that most news
- articles are much smaller. Checking the news spool on our Unix system
- I get an average size of 3.1 KB per article. You're going to lose a lot
- disk by storing those in 8 KB blocks. It could double or triple your
- storage requirements.
-
- >I am assuming the logical thing here would be to add another 16MB ram and
- >take this machine to 32MB ram... I'm using the Adaptec SCSI 1542B controller
- >so I also assume the beyond 16MB ram wouldn't cause any problems with other
- >NLM's or drivers.
-
- Once we upgraded to 32 Megs we were able to use 4 KB blocks on our
- volumes. If you're going to have a lot of small files, that alone
- could make it worth your while.
-
- Kurt Endress
-
-