[Pan-users] Re: 'Never Expire Old Articles'

[Duncan]

Karl Stevens <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Tue, 03 Jul 2007
10:52:41 +1000:

> I have the 'never expire old articles' set in my news server preferences
> box. Could anyone enlighten
> me on the consequences? Will my .pan2 folder keep growing and am I able
> to delete old articles manually?

Yes/yes/yes.

I have my text group pan instance set to never expire as well.  As the 
number of posts grows, pan will get slower at opening, particularly in a 
cold-cache situation, when it has to read everything from disk.  I have 
plenty of memory (8 gigs), so I just load pan with KDE and keep that 
instance of pan open.  When I hibernate/suspend-to-disk (using the 
mainline kernel functionality), pan suspends with the rest of the 
system.  That does dump cache, so when the system loads again at resume, 
if I quit pan it takes awhile to load again, but since it stays running, 
it stores everything it has loaded ans sorted in pan's memory, so it 
doesn't have to sort it again as long as I don't quit and restart pan.  
That works fine, and pan's always loaded when I want to use it.

I think I've been running it that way about a year, so I have about a 
year's worth of text posts around, for the groups I follow, anyway.  On 
disk, it appears I'm using 141 megabytes total, 128 megs of that in the 
article cache, 8 megs in the groups list.

Obviously, the biggest storage expense is in the cached messages.  You 
can delete those manually, no problem.  However, pan keeps the overviews 
and threading info separately, and just deleting the cached articles 
won't delete that.  In theory, you could clean up the threading as well, 
as the files for that are editable plain text too, but it'd be a bit of a 
hassle.  I've not tried it, so can't say for sure whether it's the 
threading or the cache loading that takes the extra time.  I think it's 
the threading, however, so just deleting the cache won't get all your pan 
loading speed back, tho it might get some of it back.  Of course, you can 
simply clear out the threading and overview indexing files as well, then 
redownload what's still on the server if desired, if you want all your 
loading speed back.

There is another alternative, however.  Note that while the expiration 
choices in the dropdown boxes are rather arbitrary, pan actually stores 
the expiration time in days, in the server file.  If you edit it directly 
there, you can set any number of days you want, 365 if you want a year, 
longer if you want, or a single day, or anything in between.  So if you 
simply don't like the choices in the GUI, edit the config directly and 
set it to what you want there.  I might eventually do that, setting it to 
say 270 days (~9 months).  However, the pan load times aren't /that/ bad 
yet, as long as I set pan to load and stay loaded, so no urgency so far.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman