how does history file get too large?

[Mark Hittinger]

> One piece of information - about 45% of the entries in the history file
> were "rejected or expired"
> ...
> Thanks much for any ideas.

Sounds like spam and the cancels for that spam are being remembered too long.

Look in your expire.ctl file.  The /remember/:n value may be too large.

You can also do something like:

control:A:0:1:1
control.*:A:0:1:1

To get rid of control message history quicker.

*.jobs:A:0:1:1
*.jobs.*:A:0:1:1 

used to also be a good trick but I don't think these groups are quite the
problem they once were. :-) :-(

There are some other "high volume" groups like news.lists.filters and the
alt.sex series where you might want to reduce the retention of history.

Basically if the article has expired anyway (because of high volume and
small cycbuffs) then it doesn't make too much sense to keep the history
for it.  If you look at the -c startup argument for innd you can reject
articles that are older than a certain date and not have to keep lots
of history.

With a few of these changes you should be able to get the history file
size reduced.

Another side benefit of a reduced history file size is that things are
faster.

Later

Mark Hittinger
bugs at pu.net