Re: Expire problems

From: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (labrat@pobox.com)
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 1997 19:31:03 -0600

On Thu, 18 Dec 1997 23:23:41 GMT+1,
Markus Quandt <markus.quandt@uni-koeln.de> wrote this about
Re: Expire problems:
>** Reply to note from labrat@pobox.com Wed, 17 Dec 1997
>15:59:43 -0600
>
>Thanks to 'LabRat' and Yngvar for the answers. I think I now
>have got the point about expiring - but one more question: Is
>it correct that an article is always written to a _contiguous_
>stretch of space in the news.dat file? Only then my analogy to
>FAT wouldn't hold, and the space of deleted articles would
>most probably be recovered some time.

Yes. An article is only imported into the existing newsbase when there
is a corresponding amount of contiguous free space within the
database. Say you're importing a 250K uuencoded binary. If there is
a single space amounting to 260K within the newsbase, it's stuck
inside the newsbase with a 10K free space available for another
message import. If there is no single space >250K, the newsbase
expands by 250K.
>
>And to LabRat: What is NNGIN? Never heard of this.

NNIGN is one of Tim Middleton's Yarn utilities, and stands for 'No
News Is Good News.' It analyses your existing newsbase and tells you
how big you newsbase is, how much space is used by non-expired
messages, how much free space exists, how much is wasted between
messages and how many blocks there are. The zip for this contains
both OS/2 and DOS binaries. Tim has written several utilities I can't
live without such as YEP and NNIGN. Connect to his page at
www.vex.net~x although there's also a link on the main Yarn page.

-- 
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