Re: Excessively Large NEWS.DAT File
John Youril (jyouril@netcom.com)
Fri, 19 Apr 1996 04:29:20 -0800
Debra Walker <debraw@wwa.com> wrote:
>At 12:30 PM 4/18/96 -0400, 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.
>
>FWIW, I am running Yarn95 (Ver. 0.90), and my \Yarn directory is on my D
>drive. I have not seen my news.dat file become very large. I import
>newsgroup articles every day. However, I do run "expire -r" at least every
>other day, once I have saved anything to disk (in folders). Currently, my
>news.dat file is about 15KB, and I have ~31 MB free on the D drive. Does
>this all make a difference?
>
>Just curious...
It appears that if Expire is not run on a regular basis, Yarn tends
to orphen old/read articles (this is especially true if there is an
abnormal program termination). Neither Expire nor Rebuild find
these articles on the first pass. If, however, you reenter yarn,
mark anything read, and then rerun Rebuild, all of the orphaned
articles will be deleted.
This behavior is not specific to version .90 -- all versions of Yarn
that I have run have had this characteristic.
John