Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!sri-spam!ames!lll-lcc!unisoft!gethen!farren
From: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Patch to limit nightly batches
Message-ID: <669@gethen.UUCP>
Date: 9 Feb 88 23:10:34 GMT
Reply-To: farren@gethen.UUCP (Michael J. Farren)
Organization: There's Unix there in Oakland
Lines: 145

Recently, I have seen a singularly unpleasant phenomenon - after
several days of no new news at all, ten to fifteen megabytes of news
will arrive in one big lump.  What I think is happening is that an
upstream site has a nearly full spool directory, and when it starts
to send (or receive) news, cannot accept the transactions.  When
expire is run, there is space, so all of the pent-up news is sent
downstream at once, which, unfortunately, may well cause the downstream
site's spool directory to become full, reproducing the problem.  Bad
enough in itself, this problem can also cause articles, mail, and other
uucp transactions to be lost, as they fall out of the bottom of the
full spool directories.

If I'm way off base in my suppositions or my solutions, please let
me know.

--------

This is a set of context diffs which, when applied to the standard
'sendbatch' script, will produce a script which will attempt to limit
the total amount of news passed to a downstream site on any given
night.  Properly applied, it should not cause anything to be lost,
just spread over time, so that variations in news flow will tend to
be evened out, avoiding overpopulation problems in spool directories.

There has been an additional flag added to the command line syntax of
sendbatch.  This flag, -l, will invoke the limiting function.  A typical
entry in crontab for the new sendbatch would look like:

sendbatch -c -l systemname

The limits are set with the DAILY parameter.  Edit the script to fit
your own needs; the value is currently set at 5000000, which is somewhat
larger than the average daily news volume, but small enough to help.
Note that this doesn't represent the actual volume of news - it's
simply a counter, used in conjunction with the value batch uses to
limit the size of its batches.  For example, the standard limitation
number used by batch is 50000.  With this value, sendbatch invoked with
the limit flag will limit itself to 10 batches per night.  On average,
this should come pretty close to the DAILY figure.

-------- Diffs follow - cut here --------

*** sendbatch.old	Thu Sep 10 03:50:47 1987
--- sendbatch	Tue Feb  9 14:25:00 1988
***************
*** 1,4
  : '@(#)sendbatch.sh	1.10	9/23/86'
  
  cflags=
  LIM=50000

--- 1,5 -----
  : '@(#)sendbatch.sh	1.10	9/23/86'
+ : 'Modified for batch limiting  2/09/88'
  
  cflags=
  LIM=50000
***************
*** 2,7
  
  cflags=
  LIM=50000
  CMD='/usr/lib/news/batch /usr/spool/batch/$rmt $BLIM'
  ECHO=
  COMP=

--- 3,10 -----
  
  cflags=
  LIM=50000
+ DAILY=5000000
+ TOTAL=
  CMD='/usr/lib/news/batch /usr/spool/batch/$rmt $BLIM'
  ECHO=
  COMP=
***************
*** 31,36
  			DOIHAVE=`uuname -l`
  		fi
  		continue;;
  	esac
  
  	if test -n "$COMP"

--- 34,41 -----
  			DOIHAVE=`uuname -l`
  		fi
  		continue;;
+         -l)     TOTAL=0
+ 		continue;;
  	esac
  
  	if test -n "$COMP"
***************
*** 52,57
  					
  		else
  			(eval $ECHO; eval $CMD $COMP $C7) |
  			if test -s /usr/spool/batch/$rmt.cmd
  			then
  				/usr/spool/batch/$rmt.cmd

--- 57,63 -----
  					
  		else
  			(eval $ECHO; eval $CMD $COMP $C7) |
+ 
  			if test -s /usr/spool/batch/$rmt.cmd
  			then
  				/usr/spool/batch/$rmt.cmd
***************
*** 57,62
  				/usr/spool/batch/$rmt.cmd
  			else
  				uux - -r $rmt!$RNEWS
  			fi
  		fi
  	done

--- 63,81 -----
  				/usr/spool/batch/$rmt.cmd
  			else
  				uux - -r $rmt!$RNEWS
+ 			fi
+ 
+ 			if test -n $TOTAL
+ 			then
+ 				TOTAL=`expr $TOTAL + $LIM`
+ 				if test $TOTAL -ge $DAILY
+ 				then
+ 					if test -f /usr/spool/batch/$rmt.work
+ 					then
+ 						mv /usr/spool/batch/$rmt.work /usr/spool/batch/$rmt
+ 					fi
+ 			    		break 
+ 				fi
  			fi
  		fi
  	done

-- 
Michael J. Farren             | "INVESTIGATE your point of view, don't just 
{ucbvax, uunet, hoptoad}!     | dogmatize it!  Reflect on it and re-evaluate
        unisoft!gethen!farren | it.  You may want to change your mind someday."
gethen!farren@lll-winken.llnl.gov ----- Tom Reingold, from alt.flame