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From: netnews@wnuxb.UUCP (Ron Heiby)
Newsgroups: net.news.adm,net.news.b
Subject: What's being read?
Message-ID: <362@wnuxb.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 5-Feb-85 10:48:37 EST
Article-I.D.: wnuxb.362
Posted: Tue Feb  5 10:48:37 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 6-Feb-85 05:50:27 EST
Organization: AT&T - Warrenville Data Center, IL
Lines: 39
Xref: watmath net.news.adm:253 net.news.b:1068

Somewhere, I saw a question asking whether it was possible to determine what
news on a site is actually being read.  I would love to be able to find out
that there are only 12-18 newsgroups actually used by my people.  It would
make it much easier to be innocuous in terms of disk space and cycles used.

I am being pressured to reduce the space used by netnews.  I already expire
several groups after 1 week instead of 2, but the net, mod, fa, chi, and att
groups account for about 30,000 blocks on my machine and various source and
build directories bring the total to about 50,000 blocks.  So, I understand
the desires of the bill-payers to want to trim back.

At first, I thought to compare the modification times with access times for
the files in the spool hierarchy, but had to discard that, as expire opens
each file to check for an "expires" header line.  I can't afford to stop
running expire for a week or two to do the experiment.  This, on top of
the efficiency argument adds much weight to putting the "expires" header
information into the history file.

A built-in method of determining which newsgroups are being used would be
real nice.  Now, before anyone gets steamed, I don't really care who is
reading what groups.  I just care that *someone* is using some groups.
Perhaps a count could be kept somewhere of the number of times a new
group is "entered" in vnews, readnews, and rn.  The only other method
that comes to mind is to have a program run in the shell script that runs
expire, before expire.  The program would look at each file in each group
(backwards, maybe?) until it found a "hit".  A "hit" would be any file
that was accessed more than five minutes since the latter of the file's
modification date and the last expire run.  When such a file is found,
the "group used" count gets incremented and the program moves on to the
next group.  It could probably be done with a moderately sophisticated
shell (/bin/sh) script.

Are there any volunteers to write such a thing?  Has anybody already done
so?  Do I have to get my wife p*ssed off at me for doing yet more "work"
at home?  :-)
-- 
Ronald W. Heiby / ihnp4!{wnuxa!heiby|wnuxb!netnews}
AT&T Information Systems, Inc.
Lisle, IL  (CU-D21)