> I measure the elapsed time that uqwk runs. (from uqwk start
> until the compression starts and divide that into the
> uncompressed size of news/mail. I get about 2.2K/sec. I had to
> manually unzip the compressed file that was downloaded to get the
> size.
I've been running uqwk for years, through an upgrade of every piece of
hardware my ISP owns. The biggest boost in performance came when they
upgraded the servers to a 100baseT network. Before that, they had
moved all the news onto a RAID striped net appliance designed to do
nothing but file serving.
Right now, I can assemble a 1-meg download in about 45 seconds, depending
on system load. At one time, I could download faster at 9600 than
the system could assemble packets. I still download news in 5 parts,
so if something bogs the system I can start downloading while the
system still is doing the news run. At times, I can still download
half the news run before the system finishes assembling packets.
My login usually runs:
login
start trnkill in background to kill newsgroup spam
upload replies and run uqwk in background to post and email them
check email in pine. Delete any spam I don't want to download.
(trnkill and uqwk finished when I exit pine)
start the 'getsoup' script in the background to assemble soup packets
check procmail log and update spam filters as necessary
download soup packets
logout
I know I can run filters and score files in yarn, I just find it more
elegant to deal with most of the spam before I bother to download
it.
Total time online varies from 10 to 20 minutes, depending on how much
time I spend reading email and dinking with spam filters. If I just
delete any suspicious looking headers in pine, then do a
'less procmail.log' to see who hit the bit bucket, I can shave it down
to 8-10 minutes.
If you haven't started running processes in the background in unix, give
it a try. Just be sure to redirect both stdout and stderr to a file, or
you will get cryptic messages on your terminal. The commands vary by
shell you are using. I use the C shell (csh) so the command to send
replies is:
uqwk -m -n +L -RREPLIES >& send.log &
To assemble packets, the command could look like:
(uqwk +m +n +x +L -B15000 >& qwk.log; zip -m down AREAS *.MSG >>& qwk.log)&
This will zip up about a 650k - 700k news packet entirely in the background.
I forget what the commands are for ksh, but they are different but
equivalent. I have a script that runs several iterations of uqwk with
the default packet size. I just run the script in the background, and
redirect all output from the script to qwk.log.
-- Larry