Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Expire by Date:
Message-ID: <1991Mar17.012032.9351@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1991 01:20:32 GMT
References: <1991Mar14.012332.20774@massey.ac.nz> <1991Mar14.194554.12750@zoo.toronto.edu> <50464@olivea.atc.olivetti.com>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <50464@olivea.atc.olivetti.com> jerry@olivey.ATC.Olivetti.Com (Jerry Aguirre) writes:
>could, right now and very easily, put 362 Meg of old news onto the net.
>Could your system handle that kind of "surge"?

No, and neither could yours, since your proposed changes just make it
expire earlier -- they don't eliminate it on arrival, which is what is
really needed.

>One idea I considered a while back was to force the articles modified
>time stamp, using utimes(2), to be the posting date.  That would reduce
>the cost to stat-ing the file instead of reading and parsing its
>headers...

Still pretty expensive, unfortunately.  Name lookups cost a lot, even on
systems with namei caches.
-- 
"But this *is* the simplified version   | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
for the general public."     -S. Harris |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry