RumorMill Help

Expiration Help

Introduction

Expiration is the process that removes old articles from your database. The expiration process also performs periodic maintenance on the various files comprising your database. The settings on the Expiration page allow you to control how the expiration process is performed on your server.

Enable nightly expiration

If this box is checked, then each night RumorMill will check the database for old articles and remove them from the database. This process can free up disk space for newer articles.

The expire articles at field allows the sysadmin to specify the time of day that the expiration process will be preformed. A value of "12900" will cause expiration to run at 1:29:00am

The Hold articles for X days by default value specifies the default article expiration period for all groups that don't have an explicit expiration value specified. The group expiration value can be specified by editing the particular newsgroup. Note that individual articles may have an expiration specified too.

Individual articles may specify an expiration date. The preference described on the Expiration page as Maximum number of days into the future an article may specify for expiration allows the sysadmin to limit what an article may specify. As an example, setting this value to 180 will cause an article to be expirable in a half year even if the article specifies a time many years into the future.

Disk space controls

Maintain X KB of free disk space

This value essentially tells RumorMill how much of the available disk space it can consume and how much should be left for others.

Limit log file size to X KB of disk space

This value limits the total size of the RumorMill Log file. When the expiration time arrives, RumorMill will check the size of the log file and if necessary, trim older entries so that the file doesn't exceed the specified size.

Automatically delete old article files with disk space is low

When disk space gets critically low, RumorMill delete old article files to make more disk space available. With this option set, RumorMill will delete a single article file and then wait awhile before deleting additional article files.

Aggressively delete old article files with disk space is low

With this setting, RumorMill will continuously delete article files until enough free space exists to meet the criteria specified above.

Number of days per article file

In general there's no need to change this value from the default. However, if you wish to try to optimize the size and/or number of article files, this value tells RumorMill how many consecutive days (based on expiration date of the article) should be placed into a single article file.

Maximum size of each article file (in MB)

This value limits the (estimated) disk space consumed by any one article file. A smaller value may be advantageous for installations with limited disk space.

Allow old articles to be added

This setting should only be used when initializing RumorMill. When selected the normal checks to avoid putting old articles into the database are bypassed. Use with caution.