Newsgroups: news.admin
Path: utzoo!utstat!geoff
From: geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer)
Subject: C inews & rnews speed (was Re: News delivery problems - old news again)
Message-ID: <1989Aug9.042147.10335@utstat.uucp>
Organization: Statistics, U. of Toronto
References: <43675@bbn.COM> <651@vector.Dallas.TX.US> <1989Aug3.180304.6252@eci386.uucp> <653@vector.Dallas.TX.US> <1989Aug7.230146.274@servalan.uucp>
Date: Wed, 9 Aug 89 04:21:47 GMT

We realise that C inews is slow and have some ideas about how to speed
it up.  One important property of inews as a shell script is that it
should in general be easier to modify to suit local policies than
equivalent C code would be.  C inews has become large and tricky
enough, in part from trying to cope with different Unixes, that I am
considering making some of its components C programs, where those
components are generally useful and don't imply much about local policy.

Richard Todd:
> I don't have any good benchmarks on C News vs B News processing of
> incoming batches, but it seems to take roughly the same amount of time
> to unpack comparably sized batches of news on servalan and on uokmax (a
> Multimax running B2.11 News under BSD4.2).

If B news doesn't take at least ten times as much elapsed and CPU time
as C news to process identical input batches on the same machine, after
subtracting uncompress or bdecode or uudecode time, then something is
seriously wrong, possibly with your C news configuration.  Given the
vast amount of disk i/o performed by B rnews, it just isn't possible
for B news and properly-configured C news to be even close in running
times (if it were, we would still be running B news!).

However, posting 300 separate cancellations via inews isn't sensible,
under B or C news.  The way to cope with 300 cancellations is to
generate the articles mechanically as one batch and feed it to
relaynews.  About the only non-trivial thing inews does it to add a
unique Message-ID:, and that may be worth breaking out and
reimplementing in C.  It still amazes me that people use inews directly
at all.

> Amazing what you can learn just by reading the documentation :-).  

Indeed.  If we could only get people to read it *before* installing, we
would get a lot less mail.

	``... users of a tool are willing to meet you halfway; if you do
	ninety percent of the job, they will be ecstatic.''
		- Software Tools, p.136.

Please note that we view this as a requirement upon users of our
software, not merely an observation.  :-)
-- 
Geoff Collyer		utzoo!utstat!geoff, geoff@utstat.toronto.edu