Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis.tis.llnl.gov!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ames!ncar!noao!asuvax!anasaz!duane
From: duane@anasaz.UUCP (Duane Morse)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: Abysmal disk usage in unbatching news - suggestions?
Message-ID: <26@anasaz.UUCP>
Date: 24 May 89 23:40:26 GMT
Organization: Anasazi Inc., Phoenix AZ
Lines: 20

Our NCR Tower 32/600 (Unix System 5.2) spends hours unbatching news.
We're running with patch level 17, spooling stuff to .rnews
(SPOOLNEWS is defined), and running rnews -U late at night.

Looking at the code, I find that a history file is scanned for each
message in a batch of messages (looking for duplicate postings). Even
though we only keep about 7-days worth of news, this means the
history files (0 to 9) are each about 200K long; that's a lot of disk
to scan on a per-message basis!

How do big System V sites deal with this? Does rnews -U run around
the clock there?

I'm considering modifying rnews and expire to use 101 files (00 through 99
and XX for the bizarre message id's) instead of the basic 10. Does this
seem reasonable? Anybody have a better idea?
-- 

Duane Morse	...{asuvax or mcdphx}!anasaz!duane
(602) 861-7609