Installing C News on System V/AT

[Bob Thrush]

In article <617322137.22632 at myrias.com> dr at myrias.com (Dragos Ruiu) writes:
>In article <1989Jul16.000620.10241 at tarpit.uucp> rd at tarpit.UUCP (Bob Thrush) writes:
>>  [ ... ]        With B News 2.11.14 and dbz, this system was
>>processing about 12 articles/minute.  It is now achieving about
>>28 articles/minute.  Many thanks to Henry and Geoff for an
>>important improvement to news software!
>   28 articles/sec !!! Gak. I'm getting >100/sec on my uPort 2.4 system. (using
>dbz)

  28 articles/minute (or < .5 article/second) compared to >100/sec ... 
Hmm...  Sounds like tarpit is at least 200x slower than your machine.
Are you sure about your nos?  :-)

  I just rechecked the numbers today.  2392 articles in 4123 seconds
which works out to ~34 articles/minute (not per second!).  The 2392
articles were obtained via `wc -l /usr/local/lib/news/log'.  The
times were obtained by adding up differences between the stop and start
times for the newsrun entries in /usr/lib/cron/log.

>   Some suggestions:
>
>      - Get the compress sources, and fudge a version of compress that only
>	uses 12 bits. Compile in small model. This is a major speed win.
>	(Just define PCXT in the sources and remove the microport
>	specific patches if you have applied them.)

  I have been running the small optimized -Dpcxt compress this way 
since last fall.  You're right about the speed win.  In the past,
I had cobbled up rnews (B News version) to do something like newsrun
thereby allowing the performance win but also safely accepting
16-bit compressed batches.  (I have inserted my special 12 bit
compress ahead of the normal compress in newsrun.)

  I would like to see an even faster version of compress.

>      - Compile news in the small model. Small model programs work MUCH
>	faster. It seems to work fine in the small model.

  In my first (and so far only) attempt in small model, I had
problems with expire (mentioned in <1989Jul16.000620.10241 at tarpit.uucp>
which Henry correctly diagnosed as SMALLMEM not being defined.
Do you suppose it's the large model that's keeping me from getting
100 articles/second?  :-)

  Your point about the small model is well taken.  When I incorporate
the July 23rd patches, I will definitely go with the small model.

>-- 
>Dragos Ruiu          What do you get when you cross a grape with an elephant ?
>myrias!dr                        Grape Elephant Sine Theta
-- 
Bob Thrush                 UUCP: uunet!tarpit!rd
Automation Intelligence,   1200 W. Colonial Drive, Orlando, Florida 32804