Subj : Re: Message area limits?
To   : Nick Andre
From : Paul Hayton
Date : Fri Feb 11 2022 03:11 pm

On 10 Feb 2022 at 07:30p, Nick Andre pondered and said...
 
 NA> I ring the Cowbell for feedback on this scenario:

what does this mean? Is cowbell some USA/Canada thing or reference to pop culture or?

 NA> A downlink of mine wants to lovingly request all 60,000+ Usenet areas 
 NA> available on my system. My system happily fufills the requests...  but I

[snip]

 NA> Asking because I want to recommend Mystic with its JAM storage format
 NA> for this daunting task instead of the *.MSG format D'Bridge is currently
 NA> limited to.

I looked into this some time ago thinking of using Mystic for a Usenet HUB. 

 NA> - What is the maximum size of an Areafix request in Mystic?

this one is big, the current mutil.ini talks of a rescan size of 999999999 messages. if you mean size of packet or arc size  you can set that also or make it unlimited.

 NA> - How many total Echomail areas can Mystic handle?

This one I want to say circa 500 but I may well be wrong, I know I think least time I played I started to hit some limits here. Ideally you want (as you mention) 60k bases etc.

Another issue is if you are gating long named newsgroups to echomail you are limited to the total number of characters allowed in an echomail tag. That's where I have found the real pinch points. Sure you can get the gate to remap a really long usenet group to a shorter echomail tag but it's not ideal and even then you are limited to whatever total length the echomail tag is.

An inbuilt gateway into Mystic would be nice, or some way the software can accommodate super long newsgroup names without much (or any) conversion required.

 NA> - If he chose to use Mystic, and if Mystic handles Passthru areas, does
 NA> it automatically clean-up unused passthru areas (areas with one link
 NA> left, that of the uplink). For example, this downlink gets a rescan of
 NA> the last 100 messages, and most of these Usenet groups are deadwood. He
 NA> decides later that  he wants to un-Areafix the deadwood from my system.
 NA> Can he run some sort of  report or process on his proverbial Mystic
 NA> system to do so?

I think not, and there is no passthru that I am aware of in Mystic, but you raise a good point/question about reporting of stats for echos which is an area I know James and I had been talking about some time back.

There is now some stats tracking in place per echonode but I'm not aware of any stats tracking for echomail area or reporting that can (as yet) be pulled out of Mystic using a MUTIL function.

I'd be interested in playing with anything developed above and with the NNTP server I run that presently uses (I suspect) the same gateway tools you do.

Best, Paul

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