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USENIX Tenth System Administration Conference (LISA
'96)
The Brave Little Toaster Meets Usenet
Karl L. Swartz
Network Appliance
Abstract
Usenet volume has been growing exponentially for many years;
this growth places ever-increasing demands on the resources of a
netnews server, particularly disk space - and file system
performance - for the article spool area. Keeping up with this
demand became substantially more difficult when it could no longer
be satisfied by a single disk, and since netnews is incidental to
SLAC's research mission, we wanted to find a solution that could
easily scale to meet future growth while requiring minimal system
administration effort. In the process of evaluating the various
solutions that were proposed, we developed benchmarks to measure
performance for this specialized application, and were surprised to
find that some of our beliefs and intuition were not supported by
the facts.
The alternatives considered by SLAC are described, as are the
benchmarks developed to evaluate the alternatives, and the results
of those benchmarks. While netnews is the application we examined,
our experience will hopefully provide inspiration for others to
more carefully evaluate their applications instead of using stock
benchmarks that may not correlate well with the intended use. Our
results may also break down some biases and encourage the reader to
consider alternatives which might otherwise have been ignored.
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