[news.software.b] Cnews questions

rae98@wash08.UUCP (Robert A. Earl) (09/23/89)

I have just installed cnews on my system (NCR Tower 32/650, SYSVR2)
and I have a question.

It seems that the unbatching of articles is taking forever!
There are currently 75 newsbatches left to run, some have been in
the queue for 18 hours!  The unbatching has been running for 17 of
those 18 hours, but it sure doesn't seem to be making any progress!

Does anyone out there have any suggestions?  The news filesystem was
remade less than 2 weeks ago to increase the # of inodes, it is now
about 60% full.  I don't believe that this is the problem.

Where can I look?

Thanks.  Bob
-- 
===========================================================
Name:	Bob Earl		Phone:	(202) 872-6018 (wk)
UUCP:	...!uunet!wash08!rae98	BITNET:	rae98@CAS

henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (09/26/89)

In article <643@wash08.UUCP> rae98@wash08.UUCP (Robert A. Earl) writes:
>I have just installed cnews on my system (NCR Tower 32/650, SYSVR2)
>and I have a question.
>
>It seems that the unbatching of articles is taking forever! ...

Are you using the original fake dbm library, or dbz?  If the former, switch
to the latter.  The old fake is much more of a performance disaster than
we first thought, whereas dbz performs very well.  (You can find dbz in the
contrib directory.  Note that you will need to rebuild your history file.)

As soon as I can find some time to work on it -- Geoff and I do get paid
to work on other things than C News! -- the old fake will vanish completely
and dbz will become the definitive dbm replacement.
-- 
"Where is D.D. Harriman now,   |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
when we really *need* him?"    | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu

rae98@wash08.uucp (Robert A. Earl) (09/27/89)

In article <1989Sep25.173822.18875@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <643@wash08.UUCP> rae98@wash08.UUCP (Robert A. Earl) writes:
>>I have just installed cnews on my system (NCR Tower 32/650, SYSVR2)
>>and I have a question.
>>
>>It seems that the unbatching of articles is taking forever! ...
>
>Are you using the original fake dbm library, or dbz? 
>[...] dbz will become the definitive dbm replacement.
>-- 
>"Where is D.D. Harriman now,   |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
>when we really *need* him?"    | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu

I was using the original at the time of the posting.  Many thanks to 
the numerous thoughtful souls who recommended using the dbz routines.

News unbatching now proceed at the rate of 2-5 articles per second
as opposed to 1-2 per minute.

Thanks again!
-- 
===========================================================
Name:	Bob Earl		Phone:	(202) 872-6018 (wk)
UUCP:	...!uunet!wash08!rae98	BITNET:	rae98@CAS

haug@toto.uucp (Brian R Haug) (10/03/89)

In article <643@wash08.UUCP> rae98@wash08.UUCP (Robert A. Earl) writes:
>I have just installed cnews on my system (NCR Tower 32/650, SYSVR2)
>and I have a question.
>
>It seems that the unbatching of articles is taking forever!
>There are currently 75 newsbatches left to run, some have been in
>the queue for 18 hours!  The unbatching has been running for 17 of
>those 18 hours, but it sure doesn't seem to be making any progress!
>
>Where can I look?
>
I am running C news on a Tower 32/600 and by examining the log file
/usr/lib/news/log it appears that it is taking around 4 or 5 seconds to process
each article.  You might want to find out if you are getting a batched feed or
each article individually fed to rnews.  Unless I've drasticly misunderstood
Henry Spencer the latter should have "dreadful" performance.

Hope that this helps.

			Share and Enjoy!

			      Brian (haug@Columbia.NCR.COM)

ken@i-core.UUCP (Ken MacLeod) (10/04/89)

In article <1989Oct3.002735.22962@toto.uucp>, haug@toto.uucp (Brian R Haug) writes:
> In article <643@wash08.UUCP> rae98@wash08.UUCP (Robert A. Earl) writes:
> >the queue for 18 hours!  The unbatching has been running for 17 of
> >those 18 hours, but it sure doesn't seem to be making any progress!
> I am running C news on a Tower 32/600 and by examining the log file
> /usr/lib/news/log it appears that it is taking around 4 or 5 seconds to process

  I had the same slowdown problem on the Tower, C going as slow/slower than
B news.  I took the lazy way out and switched to dbz and have been getting
1-2 articles/sec without problems.  (Down from 4-6/min, Thanks Henry and
Geoff!)

root@ddcsu.ddiae.oz (Administrator) (10/04/89)

In article <643@wash08.UUCP>, rae98@wash08.UUCP (Robert A. Earl) writes:

> It seems that the unbatching of articles is taking forever!
> ...  it sure doesn't seem to be making any progress!
> 
> Does anyone out there have any suggestions?

Bob,
	I had a similar problem with the installation and it seemed to
be caused by lines in some news articles being longer than 256
characters. I wrote a filter to cut such lines in two (or more)
and have had no further problems. Hope it works for you.

				Barry Mahoney.