johnl (11/02/82)
At ima, practically all of the news comes from one source (cca) and is forwarded on to two other sites (n44a and cfiB.) When I added cfiB as a news recipient, all uucp traffic ground to a halt because the spool directory became huge and searching it took so long that other machines would hang up in the meantime. To get rid of this trouble, I cooked up the following scheme: Rather than handing news items to uucp as they are posted, I create batched spool files in /usr/tmp/news.XXXXXX where XXXXXX is the time in hours from 1970. Then every few hours, I run another program that takes all of the spool files and uux'es a "bnproc" command on them at the remote hosts. This program allows multiple "host" arguments so that the batched files can be sent to more than one host. Finally, I wrote a tiny "bnproc" program for the other sites, which is executed there via uux, that breaks up the batched spool files and passes the articles one at a time to rnews. I also added a "-l" switch to uux that tries to link to files rather than copying them, to avoid making multiple copies of stuff for multiple hosts. The upshot is that there are about 10 spool files in my directory rather than 200, which speeds up uucp a lot. Also note that uucp delays a lot between transfers so that one large file is transferred a lot faster than several small ones. If there is sufficient interest, and when the programs have been shaken down some more, I'll post the programs to the net. None of them are more than a few pages long. John Levine, IECC, PO Box 349, Cambridge MA 02238; (617) 491-5450 decvax!cca!ima!johnl, harpo!esquire!ima!johnl, ucbvax!cbosgd!ima!johnl, yale-co!jrl (all uucp), Levine@YALE (Arpa).