Newsgroups: news.software.b
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: C News sendbatches problem
Message-ID: <1990Mar1.181514.523@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <_+2#P#G@b-tech.uucp>
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 90 18:15:14 GMT

In article <_+2#P#G@b-tech.uucp> zeeff@b-tech.ann-arbor.mi.us (Jon Zeeff) writes:
>I recently had a site that I feed go down for awhile... sendbatches creates
>empty batches when you ask it to spool up news that has expired and then
>counts these empty batches in its calculations about how much news is
>spooled...
>One cure for this problem is to make queuelen only count non-empty (> 
>1k) batches (hint: use find) and to modify sendbatches to recheck 
>queuelen before exiting.  Does anyone have a better fix?  How about 
>something that doesn't send empty batches at all?  

This is one place, alas, where the separation of batch splitting and
batch preparation isn't a win.  I have a definitive fix in the works.
Fiddling with queuelen (or just cranking up that site's queue limit
temporarily) is a reasonable temporary workaround for severe problems.
We hadn't seen the problem much here, perhaps because of relatively
abundant disk space (i.e. long expires) and few communications problems.
-- 
MSDOS, abbrev:  Maybe SomeDay |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
an Operating System.          | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu