[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[Brad Knowles]

At 9:22 PM -0500 2003/10/29, J C Lawrence wrote:

>  cycbufs implement a filesystem-based heap with pool semantics.  (There's
>  a fair bit of literature on that space in the OS and application realm)
>  As such they are specifically tuned for the case where the number of
>  calls to malloc() are of a similar magnitude to the calls to free().
>  This makes sense in a netnews world where news articles expire
>  regularly, and in general as much data is added to the spool as is
>  removed from it.

	So long as the calls to malloc() are kept reasonably small (which 
is typically true in this case), it shouldn't matter whether or not 
there are any free() calls.  Yes, you slowly build up more disk space 
in utilization, but all archive solutions will have the same problem, 
and this solution will scale as well as, or better than, any other 
that I know of.

	Consider the case where you are trying to store all news articles 
that have ever been posted -- not really much difference.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E-(---) W+++(--) N+
!w--- O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++)
tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- r---(+++)* z(+++)