[gclist] Re: Articles expiring too fast!

Erik Naggum erik@naggum.no
29 Jan 1997 15:03:36 UT


| It's my impression that these days most news readers use NNTP rather than
| directly examining the file system, even on Unix systems.  (Many ISPs
| have a dedicated machine for news, so it's NNTP or NFS.)  It's true that
| C news and INN still use a file per article, but I don't see that as
| being the problem as much as the lack of integration between incoming
| news and expire.

yes, most users are using NNTP, but most sites cling to the article/file
relationship because of the "dumb user agent" argument.

| Someone suggested that you divide up your disk into, say, 14 partitions,
| each one corresponding to a scheduled expiration date, each incoming
| article is stored into the appropriate partition for its expiration date,
| and you reformat a partition every night rather than scanning the whole
| data base.

I see some problems with this, but it's so brutally clean that I like it.
thanks for the suggestion!

#\Erik