I am running NetBSD/i386 1.2 on a Pentium 90, 32MB, 2940, and two 4GB
disks.  The news software is inn 1.5.1 with crosspost, two feeds, 10-20
readers, and a 10MB history.pag.  The disks are stripped.  The system is
processing two articles per second, and doing an awful lot of I/O to do it.
 The system does not receive any binary articles, so the average article
size is about 4K.  From the stats below it look like it is transferring
600K and 80 I/O's per second to process two articles per second.  Does this
seem normal?  Is there anything I can do to reduce disk activity?

I will be upgrading the memory to 80MB in the next couple weeks and I
understand that I need to update NKPDE to 31 in i386/include/pmap.h and set
'options EXTMEM_SIZE=80896'  in the config file.  Are there any other
changes that would improve disk caching?  (NBUF and/or BUFPAGES?)

Thanks for any assistance.

Various changes and some 60 second samples:

kern.maxvnodes = 3000  (Default was around 700)

Kernel Options:
options         NMBCLUSTERS=2048
options         AHC_TAGENABLE

Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity iused   ifree  %iused
Mounted on
/dev/sd0a       32399    18405    12374    60%     735    7199     9%   /
/dev/sd1a       32399    18442    12337    60%     736    7198     9%
/altroot
/dev/ccd0d    1556494   824806   653863    56%   52181  324137    14%   /usr
/dev/ccd1d    6146362  4678564  1160479    80% 1090134  919848    54%   /news
mfs:21         123887        1   117691     0%       1   30717     0%   /tmp

/etc/ccd.conf
ccd0            110     0       /dev/sd0e /dev/sd1e
ccd1            2090    0       /dev/sd0f /dev/sd1f

vmstat -w 60 sd0 sd1 ccd0 ccd1
 procs   memory     page                    disks         faults   cpu
 r b w   avm   fre  flt  re  pi  po  fr  sr s0 s1 c0 c1   in   sy  cs us sy id
 0 1 0 72976  4200   68  12   3   1   0   2 52 39  3 86    0  544 110  4 11 85
 0 1 0 63184  4196    2   0   0   0   0   0 45 40  0 84    0  140  79  3  4 93
 0 3 0 68768  4196    2   0   0   0   0   0 43 41  0 83    0  156  81  3  4 92
 0 1 0 73424  4196    2   0   0   0   0   0 46 40  0 84    0  185  88  4  5 91
 0 0 0 63184  4196    2   0   0   0   0   0 41 39  0 79    0  172  81  4  4 92
 0 1 0 67840  4196  190  39   9   0   0   0 42 36  1 76    0  209  85  4  8 88
 0 1 0 73424  4196    1   0   0   0   0   0 34 30  0 64    0  211  86  6  4 90

systat -w 60 vmstat
    2 users    Load  1.80  1.49  1.52                  Sun Mar  2 10:55
 
Mem:KB  REAL        VIRTUAL                 PAGING   SWAPPING      Interrupts
      Tot Share    Tot  Share  Free         in  out   in  out           total
Act 15832   252  82652  43088  4536 count   14
All 25380  5092 484268 286192       pages
 
Proc:r  p  d  s  w    Csw  Trp  Sys  Int  Sof  Flt     55 cow
              9        99  293  258        49  273     14 objlk
                                                       11 objht
   9.9% Sys   4.6% User   0.0% Nice  85.5% Idle        49 zfod
|    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |    |  5095 nzfod
=====>>                                              0.96 %zfod
                                                          kern
Namei         Sys-cache     Proc-cache               4668 wire
    Calls     hits    %     hits     %              18028 act
     4148     3435   83      208     5               2248 inact
                                                     4536 free
Discs  fd0  sd0  sd1  ccd  ccd                            daefr
seeks                                                  84 prcfr
xfers        45   40    2   81                         52 react
Kbyte       310  301   12  594                            scan
  sec       0.6  0.5  0.1  0.9                            hdrev
                                                          intrn
 


--
John D. Smerdon;  Livonia, Michigan, USA;  Contents are my opinion.
Home: jds@smerdon.livonia.mi.us