Path: utzoo!utstat!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!ox.com!lokkur!scs From: scs@lokkur.dexter.mi.us (Steve Simmons) Newsgroups: news.software.b Subject: Re: Steady state news. Message-ID: <1990Dec12.020442.4407@lokkur.dexter.mi.us> Date: 12 Dec 90 02:04:42 GMT References: Organization: Inland Sea Lines: 24 flee@dictionopolis.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) writes: >News volume is something like 15 megabytes a day (and growing). >expire needs about 10M to rewrite the history file. Disk space used >by the news system varies by 25M or more on a daily basis. >Why not expire constantly? Every time you receive some articles, >remove some other articles and free an equivalent amount of space. We've recently gone to twice-daily expires. Since Cnews expire runs so quick, it's not been a significant load on the systems and had done wonders to level out disk usage in /usr/spool/news. We expire on the average after 4 days, so that cuts the peaks by about 12%. Definately worth it. We've been keeping about 12 months of stats on how space is distributed in /usr/spool/news. Most of the data wouldn't mean much to another site unless it used *exactly* our expire pattern, but I was quite surprised to see how much variance there was from week start to week end and longer term by (apparently) the school year. If I ever come up with copious free time I'll try and work those figures up into something rational. -- "SO be it! The fate of the UNIVERSE is in your hands!" "Talk about job-related stress."