Re: large .overview files in agentized nntp groups

[Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>]

>>>>> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>:

> Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> writes:

>> 22MB is pretty big.  Maybe it's a problem that only occur with very
>> large NOV files?  There were some 9000-odd cached articles in that
>> directory after the expiry, and that's more than a week's worth,
>> even on no.alt.motorsykler.

> I've got agentized groups with more than 15000 articles in them, and
> they seem to be cleaned up OK by the expiry function...

Something very strange seem to have happened to my no.alt.motorsykler
agent cache on December 30 01:33 through 01:52.

9898 of the currently 10115 articles are dated from 01:33 to 01:52,
with the ones around 01:33 being from December 29 and thereabouts, and
the ones around 01:52 being from May 2000.

> Could you try running it again and look at .overview files
> before/after running it, to see whether it works at all for you?

I checked some groups.

			Before			After

no.alt.motorsykler	Articles: 10115		Articles: 2570
			.overview: 72118 bytes	.overview: 72948 bytes

gnu.emacs.gnus		Articles: 594		Articles: 578
			.overview: 173498 bytes .overview: 81711 bytes

ding.gnus		Articles: 751		Articles: 578
			.overview: 241243 bytes	.overview: 190562

The behaviour seems normal, except for that the .overview file of
no.alt.motorsykler, which has actually increased in size.

I'm guessing that the reason for this is that it has had added the
articles from Dec 30, which hasn't yet expired (remember I just
removed the NOV file at that point).

The reason the NOV file didn't decrease in size on my attempted
expiration, was probably that there was no files to expire at that
point (ie. the oldest articles were the ones from 01:33 on Dec 30).

So I guess the big mystery is what made agent download those 9898
articles.  Maybe the 22MB NOV file held some clues?  Or maybe it was
just to large for my old laptop?  Unfortunately I just deleted it in
irritation instead of gzip'ing it...:-/

Oh well!  Since it isn't reproducible, we'll just have to call it a
fluke. 

BTW what's supposed to happen if you have some old articles ticked in
a group, and then agentize it, and then download articles?

Is agent supposed to download all the intervening articles between the
ticked ones and the current ones?

This is what seemed to happen when I agentized the anonymous
info-cyrus group on cyrus.andrew.cmu.edu.

Or should agent only download the ticked articles?  That's what I
expected (ie. hoped for).