And I thought my 24 MB news file was bad :-)
>I played and found that when I use expire -r, the articles
>I've marked as read get removed from the
>yarn article list but most of them did NOT get deleted from
>the news.dat file, hence the growth.
Actually they aren't deleted, the expire program just marks the space
used by these programs as usable by future imports. This is THE big
problem with the new database and has been discussed at great length
on the list.
>The doc clearly states that expire -r should delete these
>articles but it does not work for me.
>
>Further testing showed that running expire -r and then
>running rebuild -s made the news.dat file
>shrink by deleting the offending articles.
Running rebuild WILL (as you found) shrink the database BUT it resets
the expire date of all articles in the database. If you run expire -r
regularly, it's no problem, but those of us who rely on expire -o to
expire by date have to wait the keep time before the database can then
be shrunk.
>To make things more confusing, this doesn't seem to be
>completely reproducible. I saw this happen
>at least 4 times in a row but instead of not shrinking at
>all, the news.dat file would shrink a tiny bit
>when I expired articles with expire -r.
The news file will only shrink if the LAST article(s) is expired.
Mine is VERY slowly shrinking - I gained another 50K today (and NNIGN
shows 14MB of the data is unused.) And watch out for articles with an
'Expires' header - that'll clog up your system for a while.
>Then, one time I used expire -r and it emptied the news.dat
>file like it should have without me
>resorting to rebuild -s.
Evidently you read the last article and had a number of expired
articles before it when you ran expire. Sounds like you need to run
expire more often. My batch file expires before an import so things
don't get too bad.
> Am I doing something obviously wrong?
Nope, that's just the way things work now. I've got a new system with
lots (relatively) of empty drive, so it's not a big problem for me.
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