[SpamCop-List] Re: keeping SpamCop newgroup articles

[Ant]

"WazoO" <nobody at spamcop.net> wrote...
> "Ant" <not at home.today> wrote...

[don't compact in background]

>   And the silly thing is that "we've" been recommending that
> since OE3.  The best "theory" thus far is that when background
> compaction runs (assumedly based on some percentage of
> wasted space), it runs so far in the background that
> Windows isn't even aware if it.

I hadn't heard an explanation before now. My theory was that it
might only happen when online. i.e. the compacting could kick in
while downloading or synchronizing. The corruption perhaps being
caused by one thread writing to a file, while another was trying
to compact it. Of course proper locking would prevent this.

> Thus if you do a
> shutdown (or of course, suffer a power outage, crash,
> whatever), those files are left in a bad state, i.e.,
> the original file still flagged as open, and the new file
> being written to has no end-of-file bits ...  So the
> next time OE gets fired up, there's all that choking,
> gagging, and aint't-gonna-do-that routine thing that
> starts happening, usually resulting in OE closing,
> if it doesn't blue screen.

>   Not once has anyone ever come back after
> making these changes with the data corruption
> complaint again ... well, there were a couple,
> but the issue was more of the lightening strike
> rather than the file compaction routine <g>

Pretty good indication that background compacting is bad, mkay!
Thanks for the extra info.