Re: Excessively Large NEWS.DAT File

Michael Lavallee (mlavalle@ViaNet.on.ca)
Thu, 18 Apr 1996 18:06:55 -0400

In article <a4mdxEqIEKhO090yn@itribe.net>,
szurgot@itribe.net (Chris Szurgot) wrote:
>In theory, as news accumulates and expires the NEWS.DAT file should stablize
>in size, resulting in a consistently sized news database. For some systems,
>this results in a smooth flowing database, where the news.dat file stabalizes
>to the largest size it needs to be, holding empty space from an expire until
>the next import. (Mine works like this, I assume Chin's, and most systems
>where people have space and whatnot ;-) ) However, as seen from the current
>threads, many people don't like this because it makes it diffucult to reclaim
>free space in a crunch.

I don't mind that the file is big. I do mind that the file is big when
it doesn't have to be so big - it's wasted space. There is no reason
the spool file has to be 40+ MB. I download a maximum of 1MB a day,
every day, and have it set to expire articles after seven days. The
maximum size of the spool file should be around 7 or 8MB.

Assuming that there are articles that have an Expire header and will
exist for 30 days (the max), the spool file should be no larger than 30
MB.

That doesn't account for the extra ten megabytes, and the fact that
I've got articles dating from well over 30 days - 27 February - in
newsgroups that I no longer read and have deleted.

It's a bug. A very big and bad bug.

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