RumorMill Setup Documentation
Expire Articles Time: Expiring articles is processor intensive, so it should be scheduled away from peak periods of server usage (usually sometime late at night).
Hold Articles: When an article is forwarded to the RumorMill Server without an explicit expiration date, RumorMill will expire it (delete it) after holding it for this period of time. Expiration periods can also be set on a per group basis, see also.
Maintain minimum free disk space: Is a suggestion to RumorMill of how much disk space it should make sure is available on the volume(s) used for the various parts of the database (the database can be spread across multiple volumes by using aliases). This prevents RumorMill from filling the hard disk(s) and causing problems for other applications.
Note: It is possible for RumorMill to overrun the Maintain minimum free disk space setting, particularly if it is set to a small value (compared to the volume and size of articles being received).
Limit log file size: RumorMill maintains a running log of connections, errors detected, etc. This parameter is used to limit how large that log file may grow.
Auto delete article files when disk space low If disk space gets low, with this option selected, the RumorMill server will periodically delete an old article file. This process will continue until the Maintain minimum free disk space preference is met.
Agressively With this option selected, the RumorMill server will delete old article files as rapidly as possible until the Maintain minimum free disk space preference is met.Number of days per article file: Articles are stored in multiple files and this setting controls the number of days each article file spans. That is, if a new article file is created on June 9, and this preference is set to 7, then articles ranging from June 9 through June 16 will be stored in this particular article file.
If your setup is handling a large number of active groups, you may wish to set this preference to a small setting, say 1 or 2 days. This will allow RumorMill to discard (expire) an article file almost every day (depending upon your expiration preferences).
Maximum article file size: This preference sets the (approximate) maximum size of each article file. Large installations (many active groups) should set this value to a relatively large number, perhaps 128 or higher.
Depending upon the Number of days per article file setting, the specified value many never been reached. This happens because the active window (day of first article added to the file plus the number of days allowed) for articles in the file closes before the file reaches its maximum size. Each article file is not expired until all articles in it are expired.
Allow old articles to be added: Normally RumorMill will discard articles received that are expired. That is, when the article is received, if the expiration date computed by RumorMill has already past, the article is discarded rather than added to the database. When checked, this preference disables this feature. The normal reason for using this option is when your RumorMill installation is being initialized and the first set of articles are being added.