Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!rutgers!ucla-cs!zen!ucbvax!hoptoad!gnu 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. -- {dasys1,ncoast,well,sun,ihnp4}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@postgres.berkeley.edu Alt.all: the alternative radio of the Usenet.