Re: Limiting Archive size

[J C Lawrence <claw@kanga.nu>]

On Wed, 04 Jul 2001 15:07:01 -0700 
Earl Hood <ehood@hydra.acs.uci.edu> wrote:
> On July 4, 2001 at 15:15, John Poltorak wrote:

>> BTW is there a guide to a reasonable number of msgs in an
>> archive?

> It depends on your systems capabilities, mainly availabe RAM.

>From a human usability perspective I've found that 2,000 messages
per index page is about as high as you want to go.  One of my lists
has been getting up past 1,800 messages per period, making the
indexes unwieldy:

  http://www.kanga.nu/archives/MUD-Dev-L/

> MHonArc does not have the ability to switch between archives based
> on any criteria.  This capability is typically done via a
> preprocessor.  Some custom modifications to mhonarc could be done
> to dump the number of messages in the archive to a file that a
> preprocessor could read to determine if when a new archive should
> be created.

I cheat.  While this is not on the public web, elsewhere I have a
script that is executed out of cron.  It looks in the target
directory and if there are too many messages there, creates a new
directory, moves a symlink over to point at it, and then runs
MHonArc.  MHonArc never knows any different as it only looks at the
symlink.

> I do not know what kind of system you are using, but 1000 messages
> per archive should be okay.  If your concern is with the size of
> the index pages created, you can use MULTIPG and IDXSIZE to make
> the index pages more manageable for the reader.

There are two concerns:

  1) Size of the index pages.  

  2) Performance and resource requirements of MHonArc when
  processing an archive.

Where the happy spot is for you is a local decision.  I don't like
paged indexes so I don't do those.  I break my archives into periods
in attempt to minimise thread breakage while also keeping MHonArc's
resource consumption under control.  For me this works out to either
quarterly or yearly indexes depending on traffic levels.

-- 
J C Lawrence                                             claw@kanga.nu
---------(*)                                http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/
I never claimed to be human.