Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!nbires!hao!ames!oliveb!jerry
From: jerry@oliveb.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: /usr/spool/news file system and 4.[23]BSD
Message-ID: <18368@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Date: 18 Mar 88 22:05:56 GMT
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, CA
Lines: 28

If you are running 4.[23]BSD and mount /usr/spool/news as a separate
file system you may want to consider tuning the minimum free space
threshold.  I have mine set to 0% and use other mechanisms to keep a
10% reserve.

The "fast" file system has better performance if you keep enough free
space that new files can be added without scattering them all over the
disk.  The default is to reserve 10% of the space as only useable by
root.

While good performance is desirable one must decide if it is better to
suffer a performance degradation or to run out of space and have
received news articles create truncated files.  If I receive a
unexpectedly large amount of news I would rather have news use that last
10% of the file system.  I can clean up later to restore the 10%
reserve.  Some remaining files may be fragmented but everything will get
expired in a few weeks anyway.

My nightly expire script does repeated "df" commands and increasingly
more severe expires until I have 10% plus 4 Meg. free.  The 10% is to
keep performance good on that file system and the 4 Meg is for the next
days news.  The difference is that if I ever get 8 Meg of news I will
still be able to handle it.  Looked at another way I can tune my reserve
space requirement to the average rather than the peak value.

I would not recommend this unless /usr/spool/news is on its own file
system.
				Jerry Aguirre