trb (11/05/82)
Today is 5-Nov. Some wonderful system just send me a mess of two-week old netnews articles (20,21-Oct). I am reading along, and I decide to be a good samaritan and cancel the articles on my system. So I exit and run readnews again and start hitting c,c,c,c,c,c,c,c... A moment later, I get a "can't fork" from inews, and much to my horror, there are a jillion inewses in the background munching away at my vax and the load average has gone up 12 points in the last three minutes. Horrors. What does a local "c" have to do besides remove the file? (Why should inews do it, and why should it take inews about 8 cpu seconds to do it?) Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491
sjb (11/06/82)
Saying 'c' to readnews is NOT a local cancel. It submits to inews a cancellation message to the proper ctl group and that goes out over the net so that all B news sites that receive it will also cancel it.