overview, expire, 2.4 and documentation

[Peter Gradwell]

Hello,

We have an ongoing problem with our overview expiry crashing.
(Buffindexed overview method.) When I last asked about this,
Katsuhiro suggested that we moved to -CURRENT because it
avoided this problem.

a) Is -CURRENT useable in production yet? Dare I ask whether
2.4 is days/weeks/months away?

b) I am wondering if we've got too much/too little overview db.
I have 8x1.5G overview db buffers. Is there a magic formulae
for working out how big the buffers should be? What are other
people using?

- If I have fewer, smaller buffers for the overview db, will the expire
work properly, thus negating the need for lots of overviewdb?

c) Speaking of magic formulae, the whole storage/overview API
is a bit lacking in documentation. Is there any guide to how it
works. We'd like to understand why our setup seems broken.

I can't believe that we're hitting the code harder than anyone
else but it does seem that our current CNFS/buffindexed rig
isn't as maintainable as anyone would like. Some API clue
would be helpful, so we could write some tools and poke a bit
more. - anyone?

c) we were writing a bit-of-perl to give us the date of the earliest
article for a group, and we tried getting it from our news server
this:

 >mode reader
 >200 news.gradwell.net InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.3.1 ready (posting ok).
 >group uk.telecom
 >211 4279 25144 33372 uk.telecom
 >head 25144
 >423 Bad article number

- it's miss-reporting the article number for all our groups. We think this
is because of our broken overviewdb. Does anyone know whether this
is likely?

thanks
peter




-- 
peter gradwell. gradwell dot com Ltd. http://www.gradwell.com/