David Chmelik posted on Fri, 8 Mar 2024 05:19:17 -0000 (UTC) as excerpted:
On Tue, 30 Sep 2014 21:10:56 +0000 (UTC), Duncan wrote:
As to your question, years ago I was the person who asked to bump the
max cache size from 1 GiB -- I needed 4 GiB at the time and it was
bumped to 20, which was great.
What size do you recommend if I currently use 1,500+ newsgroups, and
some are binary but dead, so let's say all plain-text, but some are
high- traffic like the Linux kernel listserv on gmane? I rarely read
that; it's more out of curiosity. There's maybe under 40 I'd read daily
if they have traffic, but many/most don't except occasionally/rarely,
though usually there's something daily. Most are miscellaneous
subjects, like computer science/engineering & software I just
occasionally have questions on, like here, but other times don't keep up
on, and just select and mark read.
Interesting/good question.
[...]
At a guess, I'd say start with a gig. That should reasonably safely
accommodate even your 100X the number of groups, text-mostly, for a
"reasonable" period of a month or so, which I'll say is about the max time
discussion threads are likely to be active so you can refer back to
previous articles without re-downloading, again assuming you're not
downloading everything in the group.
If you want to be extra safe or see messages you know you downloaded
disappearing (and your filesystems aren't going haywire due to crashing
and filesystem immaturity... btrfs is generally past that now but was
still a bit iffy when I started with it), double that to 2 GiB
(uncompressed), which again is roughly what I'm seeing with some groups
near-archived for 20+ years now, but at ~1% of the groups.
Even with ~1500 groups, text-mostly, downloading-to-cache near all
messages, I'd be quite surprised to see usage over 2 GiB with an effective
lifetime of under a month (even two), because that's simply *HARD* to do
with text-mostly groups ... *UNLESS* you're grabbing some prolifically AI-
spammed groups or something (the *HARD* to do assumes *humans* actually
writing all those messages -- two GiB of data is simply a LOT of text for
even a few hundred /humans/ to write over a couple months, but automate it
with AI and that assumption's out the window!)
If you're considering a dedicated partition, 5 gig for it should be good,
as it is for me.
If you're actually archiving those 1500 groups... I'd say start with 10
GiB, but until you have say a year of history to make a reasonable
projection into the future, watch the usage and consider the possibility
of having to adjust that up or being able to adjust it down, with a
dedicated partition if used similarly larger, maybe 20 or 25 gig. With a
year of history you should be able to project /reasonably/ comfortably the
usage out to storage replacement cycle lengths (double the year's activity
for a reasonable margin and multiply to cover your time until expected
upgrade, increase by 50% or double again for dedicated partition size if
used -- unless of course activity is multiplying, as it well could be on
groups with uncontrolled AI spam).