makehistory / architecture change

[Bill Davidsen]

Jeffrey M. Vinocur wrote:

>On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Paul Walker wrote:
>
>  
>
>>I recently switched back from Ubuntu to Debian, changing from i386 to AMD64
>>on the way. I carefully backed up my spool and history files, only to find
>>that the history/overview/something files seem to be architecture dependent.
>>    
>>
>
>Well, we always recommend feeding articles across if possible rather than
>trying to rebuild from the spool, 'cause it's a pain.  But if all of this 
>is happening on a single machine, there's not much you can do about that.
>
>
>  
>
>>The makehistory command looked like it would be useful for that - however,
>>I've just left "makehistory -b -f history.new -O -l 3000 -I" running for 3
>>hours, with no apparent results. Surely it can't take *that* long to
>>complete?
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
    [...snip...]

>(Incidentally, you probably don't want -I, and I'm not sure why you'd want
>to use -l to decrease batches to smaller than the default, unless you're
>really stuck for memory/tmp space.)
>
I have often wanted a more steady state way to do this which would 
eliminate the whole concept of batches. Fortunately I did this so 
infrequently that I never got to doing anything about it. Large batches 
definitely help performance, but the whole makehistory process is so 
slow on a moderate size spool that it makes only minimal difference. 
Even making history without overview is pretty painful.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979