Path: utzoo!utstat!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!maytag!looking!brad
From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: news.software.b
Subject: Re: Dynamic "smart" expiration?
Keywords: expire,C news
Message-ID: <68634@looking.on.ca>
Date: 29 Dec 89 01:07:48 GMT
References: <1989Dec27.033817.9953@smsc.sony.com> <1989Dec28.063932.13720@robohack.UUCP>
Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd.
Lines: 22
Class: query

Back when I had smaller disks, I ran a spaced based expire that I wrote.

I had the cron wake up every 15 minutes and run it if the amount of free
disk space got too low.

Space based expire *is* the way to do it.   Particulary if you ever
get things like news stoppages lasting a day, or high-volume days with
big fat binaries and source distributions.

There is a certain elegance to inews doing the expire, by using a
list of 'next to go' articles that is created every night by a background
expire program.   This deals with batching well.

But the same result can probably come from having inews simply record how
much space it has used since the last check, and having an hourly program
do an expire of that much space, resetting the count.

Either way time based expire is a loser.  The purpose of expire is to
keep down the amount of disk space (and sometimes inodes) used by
news, isn't it?
-- 
Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473