Examples on how others use expire/expirerm/fastrm ?

[BARRY BOUWSMA IS AN INFLUX OF CONTUMELIOUS FINKS]

On 10 Apr 19100, Russ Allbery continued a long streak of newsposts thusly:

> > /usr/local/news/db/history.pag
> > are getting quite large.
> 
> They do that... they top out at about 800MB on my server, which is getting
> a fullish feed but only accepting a much smaller portion of it (but with a
> reasonable retention period).
> 
> One thing you may want to try is reducing artcutoff to 7 in inn.conf and
> then changing the /remember/ line in expire.ctl to 7.  14 is the default,
> but it's a bit excessive these days I think.  Most news gets there in
> seconds.
> 
> In fact, I think I may change the default.  What do the other inn-workers
> folks think?

I think it would be a mistake.

We're running a full feed on 14 day remember time, with a history text
file just topping 1,1GB now, and about 130+90MB for the database files.
Non-normal k0deZ so these filesizes are much smaller than for Real people.

In spite of this, I routinely see that many of the sites I feed reject
articles we offer as being `Too Old'.  And worse, while I was setting up
several new test machines, keeping the /remember/ of 14 days and copying
the old text file to the new machines, I still saw quite a few log entries
that *we* were rejecting some articles seen for the first time as being
too old, since the default cutoff had been only 7 days by default, and I
didn't catch this until later.

Quite some time ago, I did some counts of messages being received that
were not yet in history, with different cutoff times.  I'd say you will
see several tens of thousands of new `too old' messages with a seven-
day cutoff -- even with ten days or more, I saw more rejected messages
than I cared to see when I was making these tests.

In comparison, with a 14-day cutoff and 14-day /remember/, I've never
seen any `too old' messages.


So, IMHO, the number of old messages out there hitting the main transit
sites is still too high for me to recommend reducing this.  I hear all
the arguments in favor of it -- I'm just telling you what I see.  Most
news arrives in seconds, but a non-trivial amount takes more than a week
(lots of gated lists, for example).

And then there are sites which have lowered their history retention times
and thus are recycling old news since they haven't tweaked the cutoff...


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