Xref: utzoo tor.news:123 ont.uucp:365 Path: utzoo!yunexus!maccs!dan From: dan@maccs.UUCP (Dan Trottier) Newsgroups: tor.news,ont.uucp Subject: Re: news Keywords: news, flood, alarm Message-ID: <984@maccs.UUCP> Date: 8 Feb 88 22:10:59 GMT Article-I.D.: maccs.984 Posted: Mon Feb 8 17:10:59 1988 References: <8802050452.AA03771@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> <314@yunexus.UUCP> Reply-To: dan@maccs.UUCP (Dan Trottier) Distribution: ont Organization: DCSS, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada Lines: 47 I too had to do panic expiration of high volume newsgroups. Our spool directory sits in a 96 Megabyte filesystem and we were down to 1.5 MB with news still coming in! Needless to say talk and binary groups were the first to be sacrificed. Disk utilization by Netnews Catagories 988 /usr/spool/news/alt 80 /usr/spool/news/can 31761 /usr/spool/news/comp 30 /usr/spool/news/control 6 /usr/spool/news/local 2670 /usr/spool/news/misc 1669 /usr/spool/news/news 145 /usr/spool/news/ont 16767 /usr/spool/news/rec 3485 /usr/spool/news/sci 2085 /usr/spool/news/soc 1409 /usr/spool/news/talk 12 /usr/spool/news/to 555 /usr/spool/news/tor ---------------------------- 61734 MB total + the 10 MB or so I gained from panic expires + 10 MB from expires in the last couple of days (Effects of switching news feeder) Here's an idea, we wire the Toronto (and Hamilton :-) area with Ethernet and use the Cray at UofT as the news server. Actually in the long run this could save us money. :-) The problem with "Don't store newsgroups that nobody is subscribed to" is that downstream sites may want that newsgroup. I could clear a lot of disk space if I could just delete the groups that nobody reads. Cnews and Trailblazers will aid in moving news but the storage remains a problem. A proposed solution. Write a new expire that works on the following logic: IF an article has been sent to all downstream sites AND Everyone who is subscribe to that newsgroup has read that article THEN mark the article for expiration within X days. X should be setable for different newsgroups. This would probably be a minor patch to the expire program but would introduce the extra load of reading everyones ".newsrc" files. Now since expire runs in the middle of the night who really cares about the extra time. News still flows to all downstream sites and once everyone has read the article you don't need to keep it around much longer. What do you think? Who would be interested in such an expire? -- A.I. - is a three toed sloth! | ...!uunet!mnetor!maccs!dan -- Official scrabble players dictionary -- | dan@mcmaster.BITNET