I hope you will try Giganews for your news subscription -- especially by May 17, 2010!
Performance/Diagnostics:
MailSizr (Win) "is a Performance Analysis and Sizing framework for servers hosting Mail Applications conforming to popular Internet Protocol specifications (RFCs). MailSizr helps the Architect/System Engineer to easily characterize the Performance, Scalability and Sizing of [POP/IMAP/SMTP/NNTP]. Application developers (who develop mail-enabled applications) use MailSizr to engineer high-performance applications."
nntpbench (Unix/Linux) by Kenichi Okada to test your server.
NewsMon (Perl) "NewsMon is a system to check the complete path of your USENET news system."
Sun Internet Services Monitor "software monitors the way ISP Internet services perform and appear to your customers. It measures the performance of six Internet protocols -- HTTP, IMAP4, POP3, SMTP, NNTP, LDAP (v2 and v3) -- and reports on performance metrics. Sun Internet Services Monitor gives you the information you need to take action before a service fails or degrades to an unacceptable level."
Statistics:
GroupSTAT (Perl) by Alex LaHurreau "generates statistics from a local Usenet news spool"
Statnews (Perl) by Davide Salvetti "extracts some useful statistics out of a newsgroup. This program may be useful to analyze newsgroups with respect to authors, messages lenght and frequency, and so on."
