Would it be possible for DNews to exhibit some more intelligent behaviour
when it runs out of disk space? It's clearly able to delete old articles
to make room for new ones because it seems to do this all the time, yet
when one of the disks making up the spool gets full, it decides to stop
sucking new news, even though there's plenty of space available on the
other disks. Shouldn't it still be able to make room for itself, and/or
use the other disks? As it is, it stores headers but not bodies for a
while, resulting in groups full of articles that can't be retrieved (and
which DNews won't resuck because it thinks it's already got them - this
needs improving too), then after doing this for a while, it finally
realises that the disk is full and stops everything, usually during our
overnight binaries suck which is the only time we have spare bandwidth
and nobody is around to fix it. By the time we can fix it, we have to
wait for the next overnight download to catch up.
It seems that the only way to avoid this problem is to leave considerable
slack between the amount of space that DNews is told to use on each disk,
and the actual usable capacity of the disk. This means we have to run
with about 1-2GB of the spool unused, which could store a lot of articles
and is a huge waste. It was to reduce this wastage that I started
trying to optimise its disk usage, which is when these problems started -
up to then DNews has been performing well and we've been very pleased
with it. Could this behaviour be improved? Alternatively, if anybody
can offer any advice on how to always run on close to 100% disk
utilisation (we currently have to settle for about 90%) then I'd
appreciate it. Of course, the best solution would be to install bigger
disks, but that's currently not an option.
Btw, we're running DNews 5.5b5 on Slackware Linux 7.1. I note that
there's a newer version available but am reluctant to install it
without seeing a list of changes - is there one available?
Thanks.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Sawle
Internet Core Services Consultant
Zen Internet
T: 0870 6000 971
E: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
F: 0870 6000 972
W: http://home.zen.co.uk
RADSL - broadband for the outer limits
Available now!...see www.zenadsl.com
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