Usenet Hardware and Operating system requirements

Providing Usenet news places very heavy demands on hardware and operating systems. It is nearly impossible to predict ahead of time how your system will work.

Regardless of whether you use INN, or some other news software, there are some common demands that Usenet places on your system.

A full Usenet feed is at least 2Gbyte and 200,000 articles per day. This average is always increasing as the popularity and uses of Usenet grow.
- You must have a connection fast enough to accept 2G per day.
- You must have a place to store the data for several days until the users
  get a chance to use it. Retention times are typically 3 to 14 days.
- You must have disks fast enough to store 2G and 200,000 articles per day.
  Usually the trouble is in the number of articles. The operating system and disks must be able to support adding 140 new files per minute: this must include the directory accesses, file creation, write, and file closes just to keep up with the feed. And obviously they must be deleted as fast (on average.) Add client load on top of this.
  
  The FAQ has this to say:
  7.20 INN FAQ I am not getting all the articles, but my feeder is sending a full feed
```
 Disk IO is probably the biggest news bottleneck.  Usually a full feed 
is more than a single Fast SCSI II disk can handle.  Having 2 or more disks 
for the spool is suggested in either a striped configuration (using ODS 
for Solaris or MD for Linux) or a split spool.  It is also recomended to
have the disks spread out over multiple controllers.
```
To keep up with the Usenet feed load, most servers like to use a lot of memory, trading memory for speed. (Think 100MB.)
Estimate your client load. There may be 10 to hundreds of users trying to read
news at once. Every 150 clients or so are the same I/O demand as a complete Usenet
feed. Load on memory, network bandwidth, CPU utilization, disks all increase with each user.

By using partial feeds of only certain newsgroups, you can decrease the requirements a little or by quite a bit.

More Detailed Topics

Usenet RKT Can I run INN on my machine?
Usenet RKT Partial Feeds

Overview and Related Topics

Up to Usenet RKT For Providers...Getting Started
Usenet RKT What is Usenet? (General overview of Usenet)
Usenet RKT What is INN?
Usenet RKT NNTP Protocol

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Copyright 1997-1998, Forrest J. Cavalier III, Mib Software, INN customization and consulting