gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) (11/04/86)
I've seen a bunch of messages in the last few weeks, all about how
various limits in the news software (inews, rnews, rn, ...) are breaking.
The posted fixes all seem to be of the "remove blown fuse, insert penny"
variety.
Have none of the news maintainers heard of "malloc"???
C news has been doing this right from the start -- for example, on the
active file, it stat's the file, mallocs the right amount of space,
then reads the whole file into memory in one read. Very fast and there
are no magic constants to tweak next time the net grows. If there's
more stuff in the active file than will fit in RAM, you have problems,
but this is also true of the "penny" fixes.
It just seems like common sense to me...
--
John Gilmore {sun,ptsfa,lll-crg,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu jgilmore@lll-crg.arpa
terrorist, cryptography, DES, drugs, cipher, secret, decode, NSA, CIA, NRO.
The above is food for the NSA line eater. Add it to your .signature and
you too can help overflow the NSA's ability to scan all traffic going in or
out of the USA looking for "significant" words. (This is not a joke, sadly.)rick@seismo.CSS.GOV (Rick Adams) (11/04/86)
News 2.11 uses malloc. There is only 1 hard limit in it anymore. (LINES =512 in defs.h) That is the maximum number of lines in the .newsrc. Even "rn" has this as a hard limit. Any sites running 2.11 had no problems with all of those newgroups. (Actually the 2.10.3 version on teh final 4.3bsd tape has this fixed as well) --rick
campbell@maynard.UUCP (Larry Campbell) (11/05/86)
Well, here we are, halfway or so through the reorganization, with
people's news systems apparently going down in flames, and I'm still
breathlessly awaiting the arrival of the fabled 2.11 in mod.sources.
The documentation has been posted, so I guess the source code should
be here Real Soon Now.
Now, fortunately (by judicious rmgrouping on my part) I've managed to
keep my news software from cratering. I would really rather run 2.11,
I think -- it certainly sounds wonderful. But it's tough to run
software you don't have.
This isn't meant as a flame at anyone -- I'm sure the maintainers of
the news software are putting in far more work than we have any right
to expect -- but I sure wish 2.11 had been distributed before the
reorganization started.
--
Larry Campbell MCI: LCAMPBELL The Boston Software Works, Inc.
UUCP: {alliant,wjh12}!maynard!campbell 120 Fulton Street, Boston MA 02109
ARPA: campbell%maynard.uucp@harvisr.harvard.edu (617) 367-6846mark@cbosgd.ATT.COM (Mark Horton) (11/07/86)
In article <406@maynard.UUCP> campbell@maynard.UUCP (Larry Campbell) writes: >This isn't meant as a flame at anyone -- I'm sure the maintainers of >the news software are putting in far more work than we have any right >to expect -- but I sure wish 2.11 had been distributed before the >reorganization started. We planned to do that. The plan was to wait for 2.11 to finish being posted, and the message I put in mod.announce warning what had happened if a news system had suddenly broken, and THEN the big batch of newgroups for comp and news would go out. What happened is that an SA fumbled his fingers and sent out the newgroups before they were supposed to go out. We found out about it within a few hours, and did what we could to stop the newgroups. It turned out that most of the San Francisco Bay Area was demolished, and a few other parts of the country were hit (mostly in New York and New Jersey), but the damage was mostly confined to those areas. One of the problems with the old news software is that it made it too easy for someone to accidently clobber the net. 2.11 sites were not bothered at all by the bogus newgroups. In any case, 2.11 posting was paused until the dust settled from the quake, and now it's been resumed. Mark