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From: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.software.b,news.misc
Subject: Re: 3.0 news -- clearing up confusion
Message-ID: <1500@looking.UUCP>
Date: 21 Mar 88 19:26:45 GMT
References: <223494f9:190e@snark.UUCP> <4299@b-tech.UUCP> <507@fig.bbn.com> <2004@epimass.EPI.COM> <2570@tekgen.TEK.COM> <8631@g.ms.uky.edu>
Reply-To: brad@looking.UUCP (Brad Templeton)
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 27

In article <8631@g.ms.uky.edu> david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- Resident E-mail Hack) writes:
>The idea is to have a seperate directory structure which encodes the
>article-id into a path name, and at the leaves of the path is
>YetAnotherLink to the article.
>...
>The only extra cost is inodes for the second directory structure.

Yikes!!!!  What a cost.  There are something like 8000 sites on this
network, or so Brian Reid's surveys claim, so you're talking about at
least 8000 directories (more for the hierarchy needed to avoid a directory
with 8000 entries), and that means over 8000 inodes.  And at least
8000 blocks of filespace for the directories, which is 8 megs on many
machines.   I only allocate 5 megs for all of the news spools.

>For articles which have expired or been canceled, we'd have to
>keep the entry in the article-id directory structure, but no
>entries in the article structure.  To save space we could truncate
>the file to 0 characters.  Unfortunately this'll cost quite
>a few inodes.

And if expired articles are kept for an extra 2 weeks, that's probably
another several thousand inodes.

Who knows, with luck, we'll get some K news volunteers, and all of these
questions will become silly.
-- 
Brad Templeton, Looking Glass Software Ltd. - Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473