expire info in history when using CNFS

[Russ Allbery]

Joe St Sauver <JOE at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU> writes:

> Assuming you're running a feeder box that's using CNFS exclusively, is
> there any reason why expiration data couldn't be removed from the
> history file? Yes, I understand that expiration data would be needed to
> allow /remember/ to work precisely, but... what if history were to
> "cyclicalized" as well? (e.g., pick a fixed size history database, and
> then reuse entries when that max size has been reached)

> Theoretically feasible? Or am I missing something?

Quite feasible.  The only thing you have to be careful about is to make
sure that you can keep history data for as long as your artcutoff time, or
you risk accepting the same article more than once.  But once you've taken
care of that, it should work fine.

I'm not sure how much one is really saving, though; nightly expire is
actually pretty fast for a transit machine.  My slowest pure-CNFS feeder
machine only takes:

expire begin Sun Jan 21 04:34:05 PST 2001:
    Article lines processed  3312954
    Articles retained        2967846
    Entries expired           345108
    Old entries dropped      1070795
    Old entries retained     4290381
expire end Sun Jan 21 04:51:43 PST 2001
        all done Sun Jan 21 04:55:00 PST 2001

17 minutes to run expire, and the server is only paused for a small
fraction of that time.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>