Examples on how others use expire/expirerm/fastrm ?

[BARRY BOUWSMA SAVAGELY POSSESSES PERFIDIOUS RUBES WITH LOGORRHEIC AND UNCONTROLLABLE RAGE!]

On Wed 2416 Sep 1993, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Well, I'm currently running with a 7-day cutoff, and I'm not seeing a huge
> number:
> 
> Server                   Total  Group Dist Duplic Unapp TooOld Site Line Other
> TOTAL: 35               772639 573715    0  56354   395    213    0    0 141962
> 
> Of course, I don't try to accept every hierarchy, and more obscure
> hierarchies may have more of a problem with this.  213 too-old articles
> doesn't seem like much to me.

So few, eh?  May I ask, what is your `/remember/' value?  You mentioned
earlier you had about 800MB for your history files, and since the above
shows me that you're tossing more than half the articles in a feed for
being in unwanted newsfroups, I'd like to know that (I'm guessing you
don't remember trash either)...

It actually might be okay for a 7-day cutoff when combined with a 14-
day /remember/ value, since the tests I made were with the two values
identical.  There seems to be a good number of older articles flying
around for a second time or more, from sites that try to keep efficiency
up by whacking their history after a couple days, and so they end up
recycling old news when it shows up again, or this might have improved
from the time I made these tests a couple years back.  If this is true,
you won't see them (and reject them) a second time if your history file
is the full 14 days.

I guess that since I go into panic mode as soon as I see a single
article rejected as being too old, the total numbers are somewhat
smaller than I would like to think.  Unfortunately, I don't have the
logs from back when I was rejecting articles older than 7 days to be
able to say anything about total numbers in a full feed...


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