>In article <UiwwyoJPMuBb090yn@wizvax.wizvax.net>,
>mrhuey@wizvax.net (Ramsay D. Seielstad) wrote:
>
>> The more I think about it, the more I think Chin should re-think the
>> rebuild -s option to either leave the expirey date as is when you rebuild
>> or let you specify to reset it.
>
>The more I think about it, the more I think there are some mis-
>conceptions going around about what rebuild -s is for. It is *not* to
>shrink the news.dat file. The help screen for rebuild says quite
>clearly that it is to reconstruct the file if it has been corrupted, and
>should *only* be run then. The shrinking is just a side effect.
>
>I would want a way to get rid of the holes in the news.dat file, but
>Yarn hasn't got a good, documented way to do that yet. The file *does*
>shrink eventually, so that there at least is no free space at the *end*
>of the file. However, I am under the distinct impression that Yarn
>imports new messages in the *last* free blocks instead of the *first*.
>I can see the text of messages that expired months ago at the beginning
>of the file, and yet I see my new messages at the end. I really hope
>that Chin changes this, so that news.dat would naturally shrink much
>faster than it does now.
>
>Yngvar
I regularly get shrinkage in my news.dat. I browse the file to see
which
messages are at the end of the file, and read/kill those in yarn first.
Yarn shrinks news.dat by deleting everything from the last unread
message
in the file to the end of the file. rebuild -s will reclaim LOTS of
space
in a news.dat file that has grown to a large size and remained there
over
a period of several weeks, while you are continuing to read the news. I
had a news.dat that was sitting in the 12-15MB range for over a month.
It
is fed twice a day with souper, and I spend some time nearly every day
reading news. I ran rebuild -s, and the file shrank from 13MB to 5MB.
History.pag remained at the same size that it was before the rebuild.
*----------------------------------------------------------------------*
Robert Gammon My opinions are my own. In no way do
rgammon@micro.ti.com I represent the views of my employer
Using OS/2 Warp Connect, and a user of every version of OS/2 since v1.0
*----------------------------------------------------------------------*