Re: [cobalt-users] Cacheraq2 and Skycache (my cache can't keep up)

[Kris Dahl <kris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

on 3/14/00 3:48 PM, Jeff Lasman at jblists@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> At 08:12 PM 3/13/00 -0600, you wrote:
> 
>> This was just discussed recently on the inet list.  From what
>> I gathered, you would need a system more like this:
>> 
>> Pentium II 400Mhz, 1GB ram, SCSI Ultra controller and around
>> 50GB of drive space. Obviously, the better the hardware you
>> can afford will help.  A Raid array would also be good. ;)
> 
> And that's this month.  News is still growing.
> 
>> (we outsource our news because of this, and besides..., it's
>> a pita.;)
> 
> Outsourcing is the "only" way to do news, in my opinion.  Two years ago I
> seriously thought about going into the news outsourcing business.  I'm glad
> I didn't.  The bandwidth costs are tremendous.  Even with skycache, you'd
> need a backup feed.

I can second that comment by Jeff.  News is the most painful thing to host.
And its the hardest on the hardware--the drives tend to get used a lot and
will eventually fail.

We used to do a small usenet feed just for the people inside the company
(all like 5 of us) for company-related newsgroups.  Like a *tiny fraction*
of the usenet groups, and we found it ate resources pretty quick.

After one last drive failure, our upstream out-sourced the news to
Supernews.com, which is a pretty decent provider.

-k