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.