jane@tolerant.UUCP (Jane Medefesser) (06/23/88)
Is there a way I can "nice" rnews to a lower priority? I thought
about renaming rnews to nrnews then making rnews a shell script
that does a "nice -5 nrnews" but I suspect it's not that simple.
Obviously I haven't thought about this much and I am hoping someone
else has and is willing to share the info.
The problem is this: when rnews runs during normal working hours
it raises the load ave. on this system so high that getting any
real work done become tedious. If I "renice" the process it just
"renice's" itself back to 0.
(I don't want to restrict polling during non-business hourse because
we also exchange email with this system....)
Help?
Thanks in advance
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Jane Medefesser uucp: {pyramid,mordor,oliveb,ucbvax}!tolerant!jane
Tolerant Systems
San Jose, Ca 95134sl@van-bc.UUCP (pri=-10 Stuart Lynne) (06/25/88)
In article <1751@tolerant.UUCP> jane@tolerant.UUCP (Jane Medefesser) writes: >Is there a way I can "nice" rnews to a lower priority? I thought >about renaming rnews to nrnews then making rnews a shell script >that does a "nice -5 nrnews" but I suspect it's not that simple. van-bc is a small 68010 box at 10mhz so I can sympathize. I run news with SPOOLNEWS defined. This means that nothing ever takes to long when it runs from uuxqt. Crontab starts up script every fifteen minutes or so: 15,30,45,0 * * * * /bin/su - news -c "nice -20 /local/lib/news/newshourly" This keeps news unbatching well in the background. Newshourly also does a check to see if there is already a copy running so there is never more than one. Batching is done in a similiar fashion, and it also checks to ensure that no unbatching is going on. To keep uucico from having to many problems I have all uucp logins start up with pri=-5 (that decreases their nice value, increasing their priority). Another thing to look out for is scramble inode free lists. News makes large numbers of small files which are deleted and reallocated repeatedly. A great way to get a random free list which is death on performance. fsck -s or -S every once in a while helps a lot. To preserve disk space for outgoing multiple feeds you can trick news in to creating one outgoing batched file which you trick uucp in to sending to remote systems by forging a link to the file rather than creating a copy. Once the links are made delete the original file. Then as uucico delivers the files it destroys the links. When the last site gets theirs it just quietly disappears. This saves disk space *and* having to batch the same crud up more than once. My only overhead to add another full feed site is the cpu cycles to deliver it. -- Stuart.Lynne@wimsey.bc.ca {ubc-cs,uunet}!van-bc!sl Vancouver,BC,604-937-7532
wtm@bunker.UUCP (Bill McGarry) (06/28/88)
In article <1751@tolerant.UUCP> jane@tolerant.UUCP (Jane Medefesser) writes: >Is there a way I can "nice" rnews to a lower priority? > >The problem is this: when rnews runs during normal working hours >it raises the load ave. on this system so high that getting any >real work done become tedious. > There are two defines in "defs.h" in the inews sources that you may want to change. The first is "NICENESS" and if defined, rnews will "nice" itself to the value specified. The second define is "SPOOLNEWS" and if defined, incoming news is spooled rather than being processed. Then at the times when you want news to be processed, then run "rnews -U" (usually via crontab). What I do here is spool news up during the day and then run rnews -U periodically starting after work hours, through the night and up to the next morning. Hope this helps! Bill McGarry PATH: {oliveb, philabs, decvax, fortune, yale}!bunker!wtm
jane@tolerant.UUCP (Jane Medefesser) (06/29/88)
Thanks to everyone who responded. I un-commented out #DEFINE NICENESS in
defs.h, recompiled, reinstalled and it does just what I want.
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Jane Medefesser uucp: {pyramid,mordor,oliveb,sci}!tolerant!jane
Tolerant Systems
San Jose, Ca 95134