Re: Some Questions

MIX System Operator (sysop@mixcom.com)
Thu, 20 Jun 1996 06:06:40 -0500

At 10:39 AM 6/18/96 +0000, Dave A. Flanigan wrote:
> Since it seems to take a long time for RADIUS to read its user file,
>especially when you have 800+ entries, would this be improved by the
>addition of a Memory file system, and keeping a copy of users there? Cutting
>out the access time? We are experiencing problems during peek periods with
>user logins, which I was told may be due to an over-taxed RADIUS system. Any
>other ways I can reduce or eliminate this as a problem?

NO!!!! MFS is fine for a workstation, but not a production server. Just
fixed mutiple problems on a local network providers news server and mfs was
one of the major things wrong. After 2 panic reboots I found that a large
mfs was in use (1/2 of the 128Mb) and got rid of it. Don't ask for trouble!

Consider:

1) If you don't have that much memory and a file uses /tmp and it fills up,
what will happen? Can you say "page fault?"

2) Drive space being cheap and multiple drives/controllers being highly
recommended, I make 100Mb /tmp filesystems and run at least 3 drives per
server (one has 5 and needs 2 more).

3) Due to problems in mfs, what is going to happen if the kernel and mfs
access the same memory area? Yep! Page fault.

4) Never heard of using mfs like you propose... what happens when you edit
the file? Besides even with that many entries, the file is not that large,
so the benefit would be small.

Not sure what you are using for an OS, but both BSDI and FreeBSD run much
better after trimming the kernel to necessities and making sure that
max_child and max_open are increased and while you are at it increase the
queue as well. Something that has been done to our web servers and I
recently realized that the news server was never tweaked. Running
significantly better now.

If you run either, I can tell you what need to be edited and what the
maximum values are (too large and portmap fails).

------------
Jeff Mountin
sysop@mixcom.com

MIX Communications
Serving the Internet since 1990

Sure my business card says "Senior Network Administrator"
They still make me do just about anything.