Technical Report: DCC-97-13

News Drowning: an alternative method to news expiring or "how not to be drown by news"

Pedro Vasconcelos and Rogério Reis

Departamento de Ciência de Computadores & LIACC
Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto
Rua do Campo Alegre, 823 4150 Porto, Portugal

December 1997


Abstract

A Usenet news server tends to be one of the most resource consuming services in a computer site. Disk-space is specially critical, requiring the most rigid discipline, purging old articles to make space for new ones; this is usually done by periodically expiring articles after a certain age.

We describe an alternative method, that is triggered by the need of disk resources and chooses the articles to purge by attributing a weight to each article, according to its age and newsgroup.

This new method achieves both a better use of available disk-space, and a better response in critical situations avoiding the tedious need of the news administrator continuous surveillance.