Re: Problem fetching parent article

[Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com>]

dsg@mitre.org (David S. Goldberg) writes:
> broken NOV files (one of mine
> did, regularly, the news admin was never able to figure out why so
> many articles didn't get into the overview

Insufficient server horsepower.  That's all.  BTDT.

In INN, a common occurrence in servers with a combination of too large
an active file (which is rewritten to disc too often) and too heavy an
article arrival load will cause the "overchan" process to backlog.
Eventually, innd's attempt to shovel data at the too-slow overchan
causes it to barf and complain about it, dropping a copious blob of
yet-to-be-dealt-with overview data in /var/spool/news/outgoing and
uttering a nefarious complaint in the news server log.

Solutions:
- "renice -20 <pid.of.overchan>" (you'd be surprised how much it helps)
- More server horsepower: Bigger memory, faster CPU, better discs.
- Trim the active file to remove groups that genuinely have no one
  reading them.
- Reduce the incoming feed.

Honestly, #3 is something that I ended up doing for unrelated reasons
a couple years ago.  On that day, my news server, INN 1.7.2+insync
running on a PPro 200MHz w/128Mbytes + 2*9G RAID0, went from sweating
at 95+% busy-ness, all day every day, to jogging comfortably at ~70%
busy-ness, according to the timer stats in the daily report.

I haven't had a problem with it since.

--karl