newsbin.com

I have a newsgroup (alt.binaries.test) that I am trying to compact. Disk space used is 159.91 GB. I have deleted a bunch of headers, hence the desire to compact.

Newsbin is installed on a 500GB SSD. Currently the system shows 29.8 GB of 465 GB. The compact has been running for several hours. In Windows Task Manager, I can see activity on the SSD, but it is fairly low.

I have 3 questions:

1. How long should I expec this to run?
2. Dose the litimted SSD space have an effect on whether or not the database comaction will complete?
3. What happens if I cancel the compaction?

Thanks for your support!

The answer to all the question is, I'm not sure.

Compaction works by essentially rewriting the DB so, I'm not sure compaction will actually work if you only have 30 gigs free and you're compacting a 160 gig DB. I think you'll could out of disk space. It depends on how much you actually deleted.

A more fundamental question is whether you want to actually keep all the old headers in that group? if not you can delete the whole thing, recover your 160 gigs and then continue downloading headers anew. In the options "open data folder" then the group storage is in "spool_v6". You can control how many days of new headers are pulled using "download age" and you can control how many day you keep with "storage age". You might want to restrict storage age so, the files don't get so big in the future.

Thanks for the advice. I did finally kill the process and delete the spool(?) for that group.

It looks like I need to do some housekeeping or migrate to a larger ssd.

"Storage Age" can keep them from increasing in size forever. The default is probably 4000 days. Maybe set it to 500 day. It'll automatically purge anything older than 500 day.