shore@adobe.UUCP (07/23/86)
Here at Adobe, we have several local newsgroups (e.g.,
adobe.*) which we never expire. I'm wondering how advisable
this is, and what if anything I should do to keep news happy.
Obviously, these groups take up an ever-increasing amount of disk
space in the spool directory. The articles in them also require
entries in the active and history files. I currently have about
600 articles total in the adobe.* groups. These seem to take up
about 46k bytes out of a 596k history file (we expire everything
else in a 15 day cycle). My nightly runs of expire have to read
(and ignore) all those history lines, etc.
Are there any gotcha's I should be looking out for?
[I'm aware (and fixed) the AFSIZE problem.]
Is there any way to avoid this expire overhead for
groups which never expire? Am I crazy for using this scheme?
For those who need to know, we are running 4.2BSD on a VAX 11/750
with news B 2.10.2 9/18/84.
Thanks in advance,
--Andy Shore
Adobe Systems Incorporated
{glacier, decwrl, sun}!adobe!shorerees@apollo.uucp (Jim Rees) (07/25/86)
We also have groups with very long expiration times on them. One problem you will run into is the bitmap in readnews. I am currently using a BITMAPSIZE of 8192. You can eliminate much of the expire overhead by applying the mods that store the expiration date in the history file. I think these mods came from Henry Spencer originally. I haven't modified inews to keep the expiration date in the history file, but I have modified expire to not even read the article unless the recieved date (which is stored in the history file) plus the default expiration time for that group is older than the current date. This technique leaves some articles around for longer than they otherwise would stay around, but what the hey, we have 100 Gbytes free.