cycbuffs and expire

[Alan Shackelford]

Jeff at litech.org said


>Umm, unless you continually add disk space, you'll eventually fill up and
>have to start deleting articles somehow.

Then I am overlooking something obvious. We agreed that the cycbuff will 
only fill to capacity then articles start to flow out onto the floor. What, 
then needs to be expired? Is it just the headers? The articles are already 
gone. Since this is a database of sorts I suppose the headers may be the 
problem, and need to be expired to preserve the indexing (not the proper 
terminology, but I hope you get my meaning). We have just never had the 
article retention that we had hoped for, and I always blamed it on the 
cycbuffs filling up and articles were pushed out. Now that we are building 
big I had hoped to use the same "feature" to control article retention by 
carefully allocating space for the various hierarchies and setting expire 
for some absurdly high value and forgetting about it.

I believe what we'll do instead is just do a nearly "out-of-the-box" 
install using several large cycbuffs and tune the storage over time. A few 
exchanges with att.net to tune the feed wouldn't be a bad idea, either. We 
just aren't given any time to do a proper setup on this server. It is 
expected to run smoothly with almost no maintenance (which it does), but 
when there are only 24 articles in alt.sysadmin.recovery you know something 
is wrong.

Alan