Pausing An INN News Server To Expire Old Articles From The System
| Field | Usenet News Server Administration |
| Went Obsolete | mid to late 1990s |
| Made Obsolete By | versions of INN that supported cyclical file stores, other server packages that supported this feature |
| Knowledge Assumed | Administration of an INN-based Usenet news server |
| When useful | When the servers news store got full and needed to be cleaned out |
Versions of INN up until around version 1.5 could not automatically expire old news articles from the system. Expiry required pausing INNd? so it would not accept new connections, and running a set of commands to delete news articles (stored one per file on a disk or partition set aside for news articles), and update the server's history and overview databases to ensure the server no longer thinks the article is still available. This process was often automated through a cron job to happen at a time when the news server was not being heavily used.
On a large server with a full news feed, this process could take north of an hour, during which time users could not access the server.
A patch was written to allow the server to automatically overwrite old articles with new ones when the news store got to a pre-set size, and update the history and overview databases on the fly. This had two very important advantages that greatly increased the uptime of news servers. 1. The server no longer had to be taken offline for maintenance, and 2. The news store never grew beyond the pre-set size, so the server never had to be taken offline to clean out a disk or partition that had gotten full.
Other news server software packages copied this functionality and went a step further by creating one file per news store, rather than one file per article. That resulted in substantially less disk I/O to manage the news store.
