Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!splut!jay
From: jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard)
Newsgroups: news.newusers.questions
Subject: Re: news.announce.newusers (was Re: Reader polls)
Message-ID: <3042@splut.conmicro.com>
Date: 14 Nov 89 22:54:53 GMT
References: <8911091544.AA21726@thep.lu.se> <3032@splut.conmicro.com> <407@sci34hub.UUCP>
Reply-To: jay@splut.conmicro.com (Jay "you ignorant splut!" Maynard)
Organization: Confederate Microsystems, League City, TX
Lines: 44

In article <407@sci34hub.UUCP> gary@sci34hub.UUCP (Gary Heston), among
others, writes:
>0 2 * * * /usr/lib/news/expire -n all !news.announce.newusers -e2 -i
>You can also run on a specific newsgroup, with this syntax:
>0 1 * * * /usr/lib/news/expire -n news.announce.newusers -e100
>I believe you will find info on this in the man page for expire.
>To quote several other net.persons, and assuming that by now 
>you're groaning and hiding your face, Read The Fine Manual!!

Groooan. OK, OK...I plead ignorance, and inability to RTFMs for B news:
I don't have them any more, having lost them to the Microport SV/AT fsck
bug.

Guess I'll have to look at C news - that is, as soon as I locate a copy
I can get via uucp. (No FTP here.)

>When you get a chance, look at your newsdir and see if you have 
>some rather large directory entries. That will slow things down
>a whole lot; it can be fixed by replicating with cpio -p or 
>by dumping to tape and DELETING the structure (so that dirs 
>are re-created with the minimum number of entries necessary),
>then restoring. My major expire run takes about 35 minutes, 
>on a 386 multibus machine with a 150MB SCSI drive dedicated to
>news, about 100MB used. I think your expire should run faster.
>I don't use the -i option on mine, either.

Actually, I think my problem is a horribly scrambled free list on /usr;
fsanalyze claims that the average seek distance on my history file is
something like 700 cylinders (on an ST251!). Yes, I am using dbz. I have
packdisk, but am scared to death of it.
My expire used to run faster, but I suspect that my scrambled disk has
slowed it down.

>P.S. I passed your last posting about the ISC 386/ix inode eating
>bug to our Technical Support people. They appreciated it. Thanks!

Uh, you're welcome, I think...but I don't think that was mine. (Most of
that work has been done by T. William Wells.)

-- 
Jay Maynard, EMT-P, K5ZC, PP-ASEL   | Never ascribe to malice that which can
jay@splut.conmicro.com       (eieio)| adequately be explained by stupidity.
{attctc,bellcore}!texbell!splut!jay +----------------------------------------
Shall we try for comp.protocols.tcp-ip.eniac next, Richard? - Brandon Allbery