The increasing dependence on netnews brought with it the requirement that the service be reliable. This was dramatically demonstrated when the long-neglected netnews service collapsed under the load of the traditional fall surge in Usenet traffic and the site was without news service for a week while an upgraded system was installed. One result of that painful event was that efforts were made to forecast growth and the accompanying hardware requirements so that equipment could be acquired and installed before problems became visible to the users.
This paper describes the major on-disk databases associated with news software, then presents an analysis of the storage requirements for these databases based on data collected at SLAC. A model is developed from this data which permits forecasting of disk resource requirements for a full feed as a function of time and local policies. Suggestions are also made as to how to modify this model for sites which do not carry a full feed.
Presented at the 7th USENIX Large Installation System Administration (LISA VII) Conference, Monterey, California, 1-5 November 1993. (Proceedings, PDF, PS.GZ)
Also published as SLAC-PUB-6353. (PDF, PS.GZ)
Updates based on data through 1996 from SLAC's news server are also available.
This work supported by the United States Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC03-76SF00515.
Copyright © 1993,1996-1998,2001-2003, Karl L. Swartz. All rights reserved.
All trademarks mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
Karl Swartz <karl@kls2.com>