[news.sysadmin] News Loops -- Intensity, and a fix

news@itivax.iti.org (Usenet ID) (09/12/89)

I sometimes run the agef command (see comp.sources.unix) to see how
day-to-day propogation affects news.  It has the interesting side effect
of showing up newsloops quite quickly.  I get results like:

   1 day     2 days     3 days     4 days     5 days   Name
---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----
 724 2138k 1837 5315k  830 2599k  884 2501k  899 3177k comp
	   ^^^^

which are kind of disgusting.  This report was run at 10AM, Tuesday,
Sept 11.

So it seems a safe bet the loops are (a) happening all at once, and
(b) consist of more than one day's worth of traffic.  Given median
propogation delay thru uunet of about 8 hours, I'd guess the loop
happened some time Sunday.


A judicious use of the -p switch in expire does a good job of cleaning
out the old news.  I've been using three days more than our standard
expiration period and had good luck.  Doing it today changed the number
of two-day-old articles from 1837 to 785.