Seeing: Server throttled no matching entry in storage.conf storing article -- throttling

[Bill Davidsen]

On Fri, 9 Jun 2000, Joe St Sauver wrote:

> -- Sure, administrators can manually adjust their storage.conf to be 
>    incoming-max-article-length + length(path_entry) + 1, but I believe that 
>    there is substantial likelihood that this calculation will not
>    consistently occur (sort of like the problem with people misunderstanding
>    the role of the ME entry in the newsfeeds file), or if it occurs, it 
>    won't be documented and somewhere down the line someone will inherit
>    a storage.conf file with weird magic numbers...

  Normally you have your largest post size class with no upper limit to
accept whatever innd takes, or have everything over a certain size sent to
JUNK (size: 1200000,0) etc.

> -- One approach might be to use either the pre-path-edition length
>    throughout or to use the post-path-edition length throughout, but I don't
>    think that would be a good idea. Similarly, one could posit a "fuzz" 
>    value or "tolerance" (sufficiently large to accomodate most header
>    additions), and apply it to article size-related calls, but again, I 
>    am not very excited about that sort of approach. 

  Since this can be handled in either of the ways mentioned above, with
just the result you desire, and since I haven't seen anyone else report
this and it seems not a common problem, I would be against adding complex
code to solve a problem caused by configuration choices.

> -- From my point of view, the best thing that could occur would be to
>    have articles that fail to match any storage.conf category result in
>    a news.notice entry, but NOT cause the server to throttle. I want the
>    server to throttle only when it absolutely can't figure out what to do
>    (e.g., tradspool is out of space), but I really don't want it to 
>    throttle just because one crumby article can't get slotted into a 
>    storage.conf category.... The automotive analogy would be that I 
>    want a warning light or engine interlock if the engine is about to 
>    seize up or catch fire, but I really don't want the car to disable 
>    itself if all that's happening is that the windshield washer fluid 
>    is beginning to run low. 

  Usually a "can't store" is an indication of a more serious problem, and
you wouldn't really want to drop a day's worth of articles while filling
the logs with a million lines of "can't store" messages. In general this
is an indication of a serious problem, and most sites would not want to
ignore the problem.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.