Hello all,
I am running the most recent version of CNews on a AlphaStation 200 4/166
under DUNIX 3.2c, and the system seems to be in some distress. However
I've nothing to compare this against, so maybe this is how News servers
behave all the time. If anyone could confirm whether they are seeing
similar symptoms or a completely different pattern, I would be very
grateful.
Running 'monitor' or 'top' on the machine shows very high CPU usage:
typically 10% in user state and 90% in system state. Top shows that the
relaynews process and some others, spend virtually all of their time in a
WAIT state. 'ps' confirms this, giving the process the U flag (for
uninterruptible wait state). However if I run 'vmstat', the CPU time is
shown as 90% idle.
The system is barely keeping up with a single newsfeed on a 10 Mbit/s
ethenet. The system is an AlphaStation 200 4/166 with 64 Mb memory, which
various FAQs suggest should be sufficient for a medium sized news server.
The system has two narrow SCSI interfaces. The internal SCSI interface has
two disks with the operating system (separate /, /var and /usr partitions
split over the two disks) as well as the news control and index files.
The external SCSI has three disks containing the inbound spool area and
the storage areas for the news hierarchies. The system does not appear to
be swapping, and there is a small amount of free RAM remaining.
Thanks for any suggestions,
Alan Oborne
+==============================================================+
Alan Oborne (OBORNE_at_CARDIFF.AC.UK)
Head of Systems Support, UWC Computing Service
Cardiff University
+44 1222 874394
URL:
http://www.cf.ac.uk/uwcc/comp/People/oborne.html
+==============================================================+
Received on Fri Jul 25 1997 - 11:37:07 NZST