Re: Expire problems

From: Michael Gray (labrat@pobox.com)
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 1997 15:59:43 -0600

On Tue, 16 Dec 1997 23:14:37 GMT+1,
Markus Quandt <markus.quandt@uni-koeln.de> wrote this about
Re: Expire problems:
>** Reply to note from yngvar.folling@login.eunet.no Mon, 15
>Dec 1997 02:09:50 +0100 (MET)
>
>Hi all,
>
>sorry to jump in here with a slightly different topic, but it
>seems to fit in.
>
>Question: When I run rmgroup, does this work like expire, i.e.
>it is only freeing space WITHIN news.dat and not shrinking its
>size? I lately did this and faintly remember having seen the
>next scheduled expire delete the articles from the removed
>group, but the news.dat didn't shrink too much (as I would
>have expected it to do).

DON'T DO THIS!!! If you rmgroup an existing group *without doing a
catchup and running expire -r* the existing messages are orphaned and
will NEVER be expired (at least until a rebuild is run).
>
>All in all, isn't there a point when you HAVE to run rebuild
>-s on news.dat because the proportion of small chunks of free
>space that will only very unlikely ever be overwritten/reused
>will rise continuously? Like fragmentation on FAT drives?

No. Once the messages that are fragmenting your newsbase are expired,
the free space is merged leaving a continuous free space. The only
time you HAVE to run rebuild -s is when you have an assertion error
(or something similar) like I recently got. Just live with the
fragmented database. NNIGN gives you statistics on this kind of
'problem'.

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