fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald) (03/15/90)
mike@cimcor.MN.ORG (Michael Grenier) writes: > Could somebody gives this try? > The following diff to batch.c forces it to build each batch > (actually, the entire sendbatch run) with the articles > sorted by newsgroup. I tried this (using a script with 'sort', outside news) a long time ago and found no measurable difference. I was pretty depressed, it sounded like a great idea to me too. I rationalized that the disk was so fragmented that there was almost no locality of reference; and that the working set of data was so large that things in the working set were being paged out during batching anyway. (This was all running on a fairly feeble machine, maybe people with more memory might have better luck). Besides not helping any, this greatly increases the chance of reordering articles so that a followup to an article precedes the article itself, which is confusing to readers on the receiving end. The only thing I found that consistently increased batching performance was increasing the size of individual batch files. Boosting batch size from 50K to 100K (compressed) boosted throughput by like 30%-40%, because compress and uux are forked half as many times, and the compression ratio is noticeably better. --- Tom Fitzgerald Wang Labs fitz@wang.com 1-508-967-5278 Lowell MA, USA ...!uunet!wang!fitz