[net.news.b] Watch out: ACTIVE file too long...

dan@rna.UUCP (Dan Ts'o) (10/28/85)

	inews (ifuncs.c) completes barfs if your "ACTIVE file too long".
We dropped quite a bit of news before we found this out.

	From all the trash posting, your active file grows and grows. If
it gets longer than AFSIZ == 5000 (defs.h), inews drops everything on the
floor.

	Inews should not just quit. Why can't it just use the active file
entries it was able to read in.

	I have increased AFSIZ to 10000 on our system.

	Deleting the useless trash in the active, our active file is
roughly 9500 bytes. AFSIZ is not the size of the active file, but the
size of all the newsgroups (plus null bytes). To find out how close you
are to AFSIZ,

	cut -f1 -d\  /usr/lib/news/active > /tmp/active
	ls -l /tmp/active

	Doing the above, I get 4400 bytes (this is after I deleted the
garbage.) This (4400) is TOO close to AFSIZ == 5000. Everyone is probably
quite close to this limit.

	Sorry if its been mentioned before...

					Cheers,
					Dan Ts'o
					Dept. Neurobiology
					Rockefeller Univ.
					1230 York Ave.
					NY, NY 10021
					212-570-7671
					...cmcl2!rna!dan
					rna!dan@cmcl2.arpa

rees@apollo.uucp (Jim Rees) (11/04/85)

There are several of these arbitrary upper limits in inews.  I have fixed
most of them, including AFSIZ, by dynamically allocating the required space.
I will try to dig up some diffs that I can post.

Another one to watch out for is LINES, and of course BITMAPSIZE, which you
probably thought was fixed when they went to the three-field active file.
Guess again.  It's still static, although it starts at the lowest article
number now instead of at 0, which helps a little.  You can still get into
trouble with it if you have some groups you never expire, like we do.
Last I checked, we had something like 300 Gigabytes of free disk space.
Eat your heart out.