Thanks for the comments.
>Granted, Expire -o now becomes a bit slower (before, just delete a
>couple of files; now, scan the entire news.dat), but Expire -r now
>becomes infinitely faster.
Ah... I *never* use -r for a couple reasons. One, I was *thrilled* to
find a reader that expired on age and not marked messages or number of
messages in the database. Two, because -r was painfully slow. I see
now how this modification has benefitted the -r users, but it seems to
be at the expense of the -o users.
>1. Ever since day one, (so this is not the fault of 0.9x), Yarn
>benefits from disk caches. In the days of 0.7x, I was using a 286
>with 640KB of RAM. Without caching, it would take more than 30
>seconds of disk accesses to open a newsgroup like sci.math (expiratory
>period set to 5 to 7 days). Then I installed a lowly 64KB disk cache,
>and since then opening a newsgroup would only take like 5 seconds and
>just a couple of disk accesses.
I need to find a good disk cache program. With my current setup,
SMARTDRV interferes with DSZ's (zmodem) transfer.
>2. Now that news.dat is in one single huge file, defragment it by all
>means.
I defrag regularly, but it's not all that useful. Sure, the newsbase
isn't spread across several files anymore... but it's still spread
across a single file. The database itself is fragmented, regardless of
the state of the file. (Now this *does* answer my burning question of
why I was seeing messages in my news.dat that should have been expired
away.)
>I say, Chin takes the pain to program for our desire.
Overall, I'm quite happy with Yarn and can't complain too much about
such an excellent program being given away. I just hadn't seen any
user-end benefit. Now I see that it's benefitted users that use options
I don't.
-- Carl (ravenpub@southwind.net) Error locating MAFIA.EXE - program not executed.