"expire" extremely slow

[Russ Allbery]

Ernst Boetsch <Ernst.Boetsch at lrz-muenchen.de> writes:

> "strace ./expire -v1"  immediately shows the direct reason of the
> slowness of "expire":  "expire"  performs a system call  "access(2)"
> for  _every_  article in  "pathdb/history" !!!  Example:

>    access("/local/news.spool/articles/comp/lang/c++/903692", R_OK) = 0

Yes, it's always done this; this is the whole point of what expire does.
It's pruning from the history file any articles that have expired, and the
only way it can tell if an article has expired is to see if it's still on
the spool.

There has been a report that expire got slower in 2.4.3 than it had been
before.  So far, we've not been able to figure out why that would be the
case.  The above doesn't explain it, unfortunately.

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

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