Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!utstat!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!utgpu!watserv1!maytag!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Subject: Re: Monitoring group volume and popularity
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Date: Fri, 07 Sep 90 06:57:44 GMT
Message-ID: <1990Sep07.065744.23603@looking.on.ca>
References: <1990Sep7.101916.1849@bhpcpd.kembla.oz.au>

In article <1990Sep7.101916.1849@bhpcpd.kembla.oz.au> bernd@bhpcpd.kembla.oz.au (Bernd Wechner) writes:
>Specifically it should produce a log (perhaps daily or weekly) of 
>each newsgroup and how much disk space it is using (preferably sorted by
>size), and how many people are known to be reading that group. This
>information would be very helpful in deciding the expire times or whether
>we should stop receiving a group alltogether (if it is very large and
>unpopular say).

Well, for the first one, "du | sort -n" with a few options does the
trick.

For the latter, a simple report can be made by the arbitron program, or
for a more detailed report, the "arbit" program can be used.  The source
for arbit is part of the dynafeed package in uunet:~/ClariNet/dynafeed.tar.Z

Arbit will tell you counts of who is reading what, who is subscribing to
what, how long it's been since the group got a message, and how many
users & sites you feed are subscribing to a group.   Arbit also produces
arbitron style output, or output suitable for sending to your feed site
to control your subscription group-by-group.

You can mail comments and bug reports to me.  I will send the system
to comp.sources.misc soon.
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473