Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Cnews expire problems
Message-ID: <1990Jan19.041746.5491@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Jan18.182952.26048@ucselx.sdsu.edu>
Date: Fri, 19 Jan 90 04:17:46 GMT

In article <1990Jan18.182952.26048@ucselx.sdsu.edu> nash@ucselx.sdsu.edu (Ron Nash) writes:
>I recently switched from running Bnews 2.11 to Cnews with patches thru
>Nov 1989.  I think I am missing something as my news partition is 
>filling up, even with expire set to 8 days...

Bear in mind that traffic has been very heavy during the last couple of
months, except for the holidays.  We don't know of anything that would
make expire fail in such a subtle manner without leaving a trace.  My
guess is that this expansion is "real".  We have 40-50MB of news online
here despite rather shorter expiry times than yours; the size goes up
during the week and down on the weekend but there is no net increase,
so I don't think we've got a leak in expire.

You might try "find /usr/spool/news -mtime +8 -print" or something like
that to see just how much old stuff you've got.  That might shed some
light.

>What are the "residual lines"?  This number grows each day.  Here is a copy
>of explist:
>
>	# hold onto history lines 20 days, nobody gets >90 days
>	/expired/			x	20	-

Note that "/expired/" line -- you've told expire to hang onto history
lines for expired articles for 20 days.  That's what "residual" lines
are.  (Admittedly the message could be clearer; I'll see what I can do.)
Note that this does have a cost:  it makes the history and history.pag
files larger.  They, and the residual-lines count, will hit steady state
after about 20 days.
-- 
1972: Saturn V #15 flight-ready|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1990: birds nesting in engines | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu