Re: article cache size

On 3/8/24 5:49 PM, Duncan wrote:
> David Chmelik posted on Fri, 8 Mar 2024 05:19:17 -0000 (UTC) as excerpted:
>
>> On Tue, 30 Sep 2014 21:10:56 +0000 (UTC), Duncan wrote:
>>> As to your question, years ago I was the person who asked to bump the
>>> max cache size from 1 GiB -- I needed 4 GiB at the time and it was
>>> bumped to 20, which was great.
>> What size do you recommend if I currently use 1,500+ newsgroups, and
>> some are binary but dead, so let's say all plain-text, but some are
>> high- traffic like the Linux kernel listserv on gmane?  I rarely read
>> that; it's more out of curiosity.  There's maybe under 40 I'd read daily
>> if they have traffic, but many/most don't except occasionally/rarely,
>> though usually there's something daily.  Most are miscellaneous
>> subjects, like computer science/engineering & software I just
>> occasionally have questions on, like here, but other times don't keep up
>> on, and just select and mark read.
> Interesting/good question.
>
> [...]
>
> At a guess, I'd say start with a gig.  That should reasonably safely
> accommodate even your 100X the number of groups, text-mostly, for a
> "reasonable" period of a month or so, which I'll say is about the max time
> discussion threads are likely to be active so you can refer back to
> previous articles without re-downloading, again assuming you're not
> downloading everything in the group.
>
> If you want to be extra safe or see messages you know you downloaded
> disappearing (and your filesystems aren't going haywire due to crashing
> and filesystem immaturity... btrfs is generally past that now but was
> still a bit iffy when I started with it), double that to 2 GiB
> (uncompressed), which again is roughly what I'm seeing with some groups
> near-archived for 20+ years now, but at ~1% of the groups.
>
> Even with ~1500 groups, text-mostly, downloading-to-cache near all
> messages, I'd be quite surprised to see usage over 2 GiB with an effective
> lifetime of under a month (even two), because that's simply *HARD* to do
> with text-mostly groups ... *UNLESS* you're grabbing some prolifically AI-
> spammed groups or something (the *HARD* to do assumes *humans* actually
> writing all those messages -- two GiB of data is simply a LOT of text for
> even a few hundred /humans/ to write over a couple months, but automate it
> with AI and that assumption's out the window!)
>
> If you're considering a dedicated partition, 5 gig for it should be good,
> as it is for me.
>
> If you're actually archiving those 1500 groups... I'd say start with 10
> GiB, but until you have say a year of history to make a reasonable
> projection into the future, watch the usage and consider the possibility
> of having to adjust that up or being able to adjust it down, with a
> dedicated partition if used similarly larger, maybe 20 or 25 gig. With a
> year of history you should be able to project /reasonably/ comfortably the
> usage out to storage replacement cycle lengths (double the year's activity
> for a reasonable margin and multiply to cover your time until expected
> upgrade, increase by 50% or double again for dedicated partition size if
> used -- unless of course activity is multiplying, as it well could be on
> groups with uncontrolled AI spam).
Thanks!  I did read most your reply but wasn't aware how cache worked.  
If I could archive newsgroups I've read back to when I started in 1996 
or even to Usenet's beginning, in case I want to read old threads, I'd 
do it, but most likely just want headers... maybe I should ask about 
elsewhere (some news.* or alt.*usenet?).

Yes, I subscribed to binary newsgroups but there really are zero 
messages in them--since '0s with companies/corporations threatening 
lawsuits, public providers dropped those, so when we no longer had on 
(new) ISP since 2014, I found those completely dead on 
eternal-september.org ... lately they restored some/all but all I use 
are still 100% dead.  Binary newsgroups don't count at all for me except 
(in recent thread here about interface bug) on a news.gmane.io newsgroup 
I mentioned someone did post an image in a text newsgroup without asking 
if that's allowed, and that's probably the only binary message I have, 
but probably just a few KB to a MB.

I don't think I really need to archive messages once I read them, though 
it'd be nice if I could access my posting history back to the '0s or 
1990s, even if it was different email addresses... in fact I selected 
'clear cache on exit' in pan, because I thought cache had to do with 
just what was used in a session... now that I read your explanation, 
I'll unset that because it'd be good to keep message bodies at least a 
month until any threads (like science/technology/software) are 
finished/resolved... other stuff like rec.arts.comics.*, 
rec.games.abstract,frp,roguelike.*, sci.math I tend to read once and 
that's it.

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