expireover

[Jeffrey M. Vinocur]

I'm not sure that I really understand exactly how expire and expireover
work.  I'm using tradindexed, with a combination of CNFS and tradspool;  
you may recall from a few weeks ago that something very weird was going on 
with my history file.

I never found a resolution for that, and just switched news.daily to 
noexpire and noexpireover.  (The problem was that some articles that 
existed and were in overview were not listed in history, and as a result 
were getting purged from overview inappropriately.)  I wasn't sure if I 
needed both flags or only noexpire, but better safe than sorry.

Anyway, $pathoverview finally got full, so after consultation with the 
manpages, I decided to generate a list of groups in CNFS (the ones that I 
don't care about and which don't have any old articles anyway) and feed 
them to expireover.  I ran:

# time nice ~news/bin/expireover -f /tmp/active -Z /tmp/lowmark
    Article lines processed       61
    Articles dropped              17
    Overview index dropped        17
3.930u 22.110s 11:54.57 3.6%    0+0k 0+0io 96379pf+0w

which seems to have worked, in that it took a long time and dropped 
$pathoverview from using 700 MB to 480 MB.  And yet, the summary output 
above doesn't seem to correspond to freeing up several hundred megabytes 
of disk space.

What am I missing?

-- 
Jeffrey M. Vinocur
jeff at litech.org