zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff) (03/01/90)
I recently had a site that I feed go down for awhile. When it came back up, I found that instead of immediately trying to catch up, C News wasn't sending any news to the other site. It turns out that sendbatches creates empty batches when you ask it to spool up news that has expired and then counts these empty batches in its calculations about how much news is spooled. If I waited long enough (like maybe several days), news would have started flowing again. One cure for this problem is to make queuelen only count non-empty (> 1k) batches (hint: use find) and to modify sendbatches to recheck queuelen before exiting. Does anyone have a better fix? How about something that doesn't send empty batches at all? -- Jon Zeeff zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us or b-tech!zeeff
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (03/02/90)
In article <_+2#P#G@b-tech.uucp> zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff) writes: >I recently had a site that I feed go down for awhile... sendbatches creates >empty batches when you ask it to spool up news that has expired and then >counts these empty batches in its calculations about how much news is >spooled... >One cure for this problem is to make queuelen only count non-empty (> >1k) batches (hint: use find) and to modify sendbatches to recheck >queuelen before exiting. Does anyone have a better fix? How about >something that doesn't send empty batches at all? This is one place, alas, where the separation of batch splitting and batch preparation isn't a win. I have a definitive fix in the works. Fiddling with queuelen (or just cranking up that site's queue limit temporarily) is a reasonable temporary workaround for severe problems. We hadn't seen the problem much here, perhaps because of relatively abundant disk space (i.e. long expires) and few communications problems. -- MSDOS, abbrev: Maybe SomeDay | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology an Operating System. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu
msb@sq.sq.com (Mark Brader) (03/02/90)
> > I recently had a site that I feed go down for awhile... sendbatches creates > > empty batches when you ask it to spool up news that has expired and then > > counts these empty batches in its calculations about how much news is > > spooled... > Fiddling with queuelen (or just cranking up that site's queue limit > temporarily) is a reasonable temporary workaround for severe problems. Another reasonable workaround, and one that you don't have to change back afterwards, is to have a shell script along the following lines at hand, and run it when the need is noticed: : cd /usr/spool/news/out.going for togo in */togo* do while read file size do test -f $file && echo $file $size done <$togo >tmp$$ mv tmp$$ $togo done (The above is not tested, but can't be seriously wrong, right?) It won't be blindingly fast, but then, how often will you need to run it? The nice part is that you don't have to remember to change anything back when you're done with it -- just don't run it simultaneously with sendbatches. -- Mark Brader "Bad news disturbs his game; so does good; SoftQuad Inc., Toronto so also does the absence of news." utzoo!sq!msb, msb@sq.com -- Stephen Leacock This article is in the public domain.