Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!novavax!twwells!bill
From: bill@twwells.uucp (T. William Wells)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: much smaller history file after expire -r -h
Keywords: more naive questions
Message-ID: <402@twwells.uucp>
Date: 19 Feb 89 22:31:34 GMT
References: <3456@sugar.uu.net>
Reply-To: bill@twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells)
Organization: None, Ft. Lauderdale
Lines: 25
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In article <3456@sugar.uu.net> karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) writes:
: The history file was 2.5 megabytes long.  I did an
:
:       expire -r -h -e14 -E28
:
: ...and afterwards, the history file was only 750 Kbytes.  An equivalent
: proportion of articles were not removed.
:
: The question is:  Is this normal?  I can see how a dbm file would never shrink
: even with deletes, but since a normal expire rebuilds the history file anyway,
: the new history file shouldn't contain lots of deleted entries.

Yes, this is normal. The news software keeps track of expired articles
for some time after they are gone; this helps prevent receipt and
transmission of duplicate articles.  The info is kept in the history
file.

When you did the expire, all that additional information went away.

BTW, if you are a leaf node, you should not need to keep that
additional history.

---
Bill
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