On Wed, 18 Mar 1998, David Power wrote:
"When INN writes an article, it opens it (O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC), fills the buffer, then writev's to write out the buffer.
This works great on small files, but large files are making the writev just hang for a second or so (not coincidentally at the same time that the dnewslink process sleeps in diablo).
Are you running INN or Diablo? You mention both in your message. AFAIK, Diablo is not worth running with an NFS spool just yet, because of its heavy reliance on file locking.
Both the feeder and reader news servers here have their history on local disk and the spool (and overviews on the reader) on Netapps. The feeder is sharing an F220 with 256MB, and the reader has an F230 with 256MB to itself. I don't accept articles larger than 512K though, so I probably don't encounter the same problem you do. Overviews files get into the multi-megabyte range though, and there aren't any problems reading from or writing to them.
The connection in both cases is through a Cisco Cat2900 with full-duplex 100baseT.