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From: gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore)
Newsgroups: news.config
Subject: Re: (*Hiccup*) pyramid overflows /usr/spool
Message-ID: <2523@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Sun, 26-Jul-87 19:36:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.2523
Posted: Sun Jul 26 19:36:49 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 27-Jul-87 03:37:36 EDT
References: <3834@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Organization: Nebula Consultants in San Francisco
Lines: 42

csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) wrote:
> We got hit by an unexpected bulge of news last night (where do those things
> come from?)...

I have noticed a similar fluctuation in received news sizes.  My /usr/spool
free space varies from 3MB to 12MB without apparant pattern.  I hacked
up the "agef" program, which sorts files into age buckets like an accounts
receivable listing, so it you can specify the buckets, and ran it with
1-day buckets.  The traffic some days was literally double the traffic
of other days.  Some of this is probably related to the odd 7-day cycle
we find ourselves operating in, but the rest is unexplained.  It would
be interesting to see if the same bulges appear at the same time (or at a
fixed offset from each other) at different sites around the net.  Perhaps
gaps and bulges are due to major relay machines' downtime and subsequent
recovery, or perhaps people really do post more articles on Monday than
on Thursday.  (David Hayes has also made this mod to agef and it should
be in the mod.sources queue.)

One step that I have taken to reduce the problem is to key my outgoing
news batching on free spool space, e.g. once free space goes below 3MB,
I will not create any new outgoing batches, for fear of filling the
file system with 'em.  Usually this happens because a site I feed is
not answering the phone and I have a few megs queued for them.  Adding
this check to "csendbatch" was easy.  The C news batcher automates this
and also lets you check how many batches are already queued for a site
when deciding whether to spool another batch.

It has occurred to me that queueing up outgoing batches is silly
anyway.  News should queue ONE batch to uucp to give it something to do
when the connection is established.  When uucp gets connected, it
should pluck a command from somewhere and run it; this would queue up
another batch for the site.  As each batch is sent, the next can be
queued.  Best of all would be for uucp to just read the batch out of a
pipe from the batcher -- why bother to copy it around on the disk? --
but that's a job for next year.  (I understand that for a site like Pyramid
that feeds the same batches to 18 sites, making a copy might be best.)
A major problem with uucp is that it runs asynchronously to everything,
but letting it "call out" to its client applications (mail, news) would
fix a lot of this.
-- 
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