Did You Know ....

Richard Schaal (starnet!apple!phx.mcd.mot.com!rschaal)
Fri, 18 Feb 1994 15:17:57 -0700 (MST)

Here is a thought. Have you noticed that if you leave "x" running for days at
a time that it grows? The cause, I think, is an attempt to gobble up duplicate
articles. The program maintains a hash list of the message id's that it has
seen, and goes through the list before trying to process each article.

The interesting thing is that C-News, in processing news batches, also looks
for duplicate messages through the history file.

I propose to institute a "C-News" flag on the command line which will perform
the following among other things:
1. Assume that the spool directory for news batches is
/usr/spool/news/in.coming
2. Change the "xnews" output to nnn.xnews rather than xnews.nnn.
This allows the newsrun code to process the batches most
efficiently.
3. Stop trying to supress duplicates. Processing time is short,
memory is not limitless, and the function gets done anyway.
This is not a big change and does not eliminate the reason to
have the MD5 code in place.

The first two items are already in the March distribution - working well.
I am trying to unload "x" of any unnecessary processing. Thoughts?

Brian, do you happen to have a count of the number of recipients of the mailing
list? I want to get an idea of the percentage of responses we have for the
survey. The response so far brings new light to the term SILENT MAJORITY.

-- 
Richard Schaal
Motorola Computer Group
M/S AZ43 DW278
2900 South Diablo Way, Tempe, AZ 85252
Voice: (602)438-3519   Fax: (602)438-3836
E-Mail: rschaal@phx.mcd.mot.com
"This is a great place to work.... there's a going away party every Friday!"