NEWS.DAT will only shrink when the articles at the end of the database
expire. Since I only keep messages for 4 or 5 days and only take 6 very
active newsgroups, (the 19 others are "info" type with only a few messages
a week), mine stays around only 2.3MB. Funny thing, when I was using my
old 286 with a 40meg drive I used to have to work to keep it under 3megs
all the time. I guess you can tell we're having news delivery problems at
the ISP.
>>Meaning that when some spammer posts a five-megabyte binary, I can't
>>reclaim that space on my hard disk afterwards without deleting my entire
>>news base.
>
>The disk space will be given back to you after approximately 2*t
>days, where t is the typical expire time.
Provided that articles kept longer have not been added after the spam
messages. Also if your ISP is up to snuff AND, (a very important and), the
spams are multi addressed, (a/k/a Velveta) and not individual copies, you
should not have more than copy in the NEWS.DAT file.
>The way I see it, the newsbase adopts some pessimistic release
>algorithm. When an article is deleted, the space is not released
>back immediately; rather, Yarn will see for a few days if this space
>is needed again. This makes sure that Yarn always gets the space for
>IMPORT. When Yarn is quite sure that some space is not needed in the
>long run, it will release it. Thus Yarn regulates (tries to keep
>stable) the space it uses. We can further discuss this in light of
>discrete control theory... :)
That's not the way I see it. I see it like the infamous STAGE file in
Prodigy once the end pointer is set in the FAT.
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