[GENERAL] Mail server load

2003-08-20 Thread Nigel J. Andrews


Marc, I'd be interested in seeing the updated stats for this bought of virus
transmission we're going through.

Yesterday you had almost 1 for 1 valid email. By then I think I was getting
about 3-4 per valid email but since then it's sky rocketed and it looks more
like 30+ per 1 valid message.

I'd just be interested if that's the same others are seeing since I believe the
virus picks up my email address from the messages sent to the lists.

--
Nigel Andrews



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Re: [GENERAL] That movie

2003-08-20 Thread andrew
Please see the attached file for details.
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Re: [GENERAL] move to usenet?

2003-08-20 Thread Jules Alberts
Op 19 Aug 2003 (15:35), schreef The Hermit Hacker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Jules Alberts wrote:
> 
> > Hello everyone,
> >
> > This is not a troll and I certainly don't want to start a holy war but
> > wouldn't it be a good idea to move the postgresql lists from the
> > mailing list approach to usenet? IMHO it's more open and easier to
> > work with. As it is now, there are some postgreql usenet groups but
> > hardly anything happens there.
> 
> connect to news.us.postgresql.org or news.fr.postgresql.org if you want
> to get all messages/groups ... they are all gate'd ... if anyone out
> there is running a news server that is willing to provide a relay point,
> please contact me, and we'll work on getting a feed in place ...

Thanks for the tip. I can't find these groups on usenet, but I will ask 
my provider if he can get them, shouldn't be a problem. Another 
question: are these groups only a reflection of the mailinglist, or is 
it also possible to do postings there. Will these be visible to the 
mailinglist?

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Re: [GENERAL] Bulk Insert / Update / Delete

2003-08-20 Thread Jason Godden
Hi Philip,

See:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.3/static/functions-subquery.html

..for starters.

Essentially, to perform the operation atomically I'd use:

begin;

update  set  = , ... where exists (select  from  where . = . (and).. etc..);

(actually i'd probably use a the from extension here  , see example below)

insert into   select   from  where not 
exists (select  from  where . = 
. (and).. etc..);

commit;

because it's wrapped in a transaction both queries have to work or it's all 
rolled back.  This example only applies to comparing two tables.  You can 
specify a value list if need be.

As an actual example:

begin;

update table1 set col1 = table2.col1, col2 = table2.col2 from 
table2 where table2.key = table1.key;

(whatever your key may be..)

insert into table1 (col1,col2) select col1,col2 from table2 where not exists 
(select col1,col2 from table1 where table1.col1 = table2.col1 and table1.col2 
= table2.col2);

(in this ^^^ I'm assuming your keys are col1 and col2 and so it's not 
consistent with the update but you get the idea.

commit;

Rgds,

Jason

On Wed, 20 Aug 2003 01:03 pm, Philip Boonzaaier wrote:
> Hi Jason
>
> Thanks for your prompt response.
>
> I'm pretty new to SQL, so please excuse the following rather stupid
> question
>
>
> How do I use the (NOT) EXISTS or (NOT) IN clause ? Would it be feasible,
> using your suggestion, to simply put in two SQL statements, in the same
> query - first UPDATE when EXISTS, then INSERT when NOT EXISTS, to
> accomplist this in one go ?
>
> Regards
>
> Phil
>
> - Original Message -
> From: Jason Godden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: Philip Boonzaaier <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2003 4:42 PM
> Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Bulk Insert / Update / Delete
>
>
> Hi Philip,
>
> Pg is more ansi compliant than most (GoodThing (TM)).  You can use the
> 'when'
> conditional but not to do what you need.  If I understand you correclty you
> should be able to acheive the same result using two seperate queries and
> the (NOT) EXISTS or (NOT) IN clause.  Failing that have a look at the fine
> docs on pl/pgsql and other postgresql procedural languages which allow you
> to use loops and conditional statements like 'if'.
>
> Rgds,
>
> J
>
> On Wed, 20 Aug 2003 12:21 pm, Philip Boonzaaier wrote:
> > I want to be able to generate SQL statements that will go through a list
>
> of
>
> > data, effectively row by row, enquire on the database if this exists in
>
> the
>
> > selected table- If it exists, then the colums must be UPDATED, if not,
>
> they
>
> > must be INSERTED.
> >
> > Logically then, I would like to SELECT * FROM 
> > WHERE , and then IF FOUND
> > UPDATE  SET   ELSE
> > INSERT INTO  VALUES 
> > END IF;
> >
> > The IF statement gets rejected by the parser. So it would appear that
> > PostgreSQL does not support an IF in this type of query, or maybe not at
> > all.
> >
> > Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can achieve this ?
> >
> >
> > This message is privileged and confidential and intended for the
> > addressee only. If you are not the intended recipient you may not
> > disclose, copy or in any way use or publish the content hereof, which is
> > subject to copyright.If you have received this in error, please destroy
> > the original message and contact us at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Any views
> > expressed in
>
> this
>
> > message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender
> > specifically states them to be the view of Computerkit Retail Systems,
> > its subsidiaries or associates. Please note that the recipient must scan
> > this e-mail and attachments for  viruses. We accept no liability of
> > whatever nature for any loss, liability,damage or expense resulting
> > directly or indirectly from this transmission of this message and/or
> > attachments.
> >
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> >
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> This message is privileged and confidential and intended for the addressee
> only. If you are not the intended recipient you may not disclose, copy or
> in any way use or publish the content hereof, which is subject to
> copyright.If you have received this in error, please destroy the original
> message and contact us at [EMAIL PROTECTED] Any views expressed in this
> message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender
> specifically states them to be the view of Computerkit Retail Systems, its
> subsidiaries or associates. Please note that the recipient must scan this
> e-mail and attachments for  viruses. We accept no liability of whatever
> nature for any loss, liability,damage or expense resulting directly or
> indirectly from this transmission of this message and/or attachments.
>
> -

Re: [GENERAL] Details

2003-08-20 Thread meskes
Please see the attached file for details.
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Re: [GENERAL] Mail server load

2003-08-20 Thread The Hermit Hacker

So far today:

neptune# awk '{print $7}' /var/log/amavisd | sort | uniq -c
 137 BAD
1732 BANNED
4435 INFECTED
6029 Passed,


On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Nigel J. Andrews wrote:

>
>
> Marc, I'd be interested in seeing the updated stats for this bought of virus
> transmission we're going through.
>
> Yesterday you had almost 1 for 1 valid email. By then I think I was getting
> about 3-4 per valid email but since then it's sky rocketed and it looks more
> like 30+ per 1 valid message.
>
> I'd just be interested if that's the same others are seeing since I believe the
> virus picks up my email address from the messages sent to the lists.
>
> --
> Nigel Andrews
>
>
>
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>
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>

Marc G. Fournier   ICQ#7615664   IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: [EMAIL PROTECTED]   secondary: [EMAIL PROTECTED]|postgresql}.org

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Re: [GENERAL] move to usenet?

2003-08-20 Thread The Hermit Hacker
On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Jules Alberts wrote:

> Op 19 Aug 2003 (15:35), schreef The Hermit Hacker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> > On Tue, 19 Aug 2003, Jules Alberts wrote:
> >
> > > Hello everyone,
> > >
> > > This is not a troll and I certainly don't want to start a holy war but
> > > wouldn't it be a good idea to move the postgresql lists from the
> > > mailing list approach to usenet? IMHO it's more open and easier to
> > > work with. As it is now, there are some postgreql usenet groups but
> > > hardly anything happens there.
> >
> > connect to news.us.postgresql.org or news.fr.postgresql.org if you want
> > to get all messages/groups ... they are all gate'd ... if anyone out
> > there is running a news server that is willing to provide a relay point,
> > please contact me, and we'll work on getting a feed in place ...
>
> Thanks for the tip. I can't find these groups on usenet, but I will ask
> my provider if he can get them, shouldn't be a problem. Another
> question: are these groups only a reflection of the mailinglist, or is
> it also possible to do postings there. Will these be visible to the
> mailinglist?

The gateway is bi-directional, but unless you are actually subscribed to
the mailing list (there is a set nomail option available), your posting
has to go through the moderator (me) before it gets to the mailing list
*from* usenet ...


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Re: [GENERAL] Mail server load

2003-08-20 Thread Francois Suter
So far today:

neptune# awk '{print $7}' /var/log/amavisd | sort | uniq -c
 137 BAD
1732 BANNED
4435 INFECTED
6029 Passed,
And still some make it through given some of the messages that are 
reaching the list today ("That movie" or "My details"). :-(

---
Francois
Home page: http://www.monpetitcoin.com/

"Would Descartes have programmed in Pascal?" - Umberto Eco

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Re: [GENERAL] Mail server load

2003-08-20 Thread The Hermit Hacker
On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Francois Suter wrote:

> > So far today:
> >
> > neptune# awk '{print $7}' /var/log/amavisd | sort | uniq -c
> >  137 BAD
> > 1732 BANNED
> > 4435 INFECTED
> > 6029 Passed,
>
> And still some make it through given some of the messages that are
> reaching the list today ("That movie" or "My details"). :-(

Actually, unless I'm mistaken, none have made it through ... at least all
the ones with subject's like "That movie" that I've opened (thank god for
Unix) didn't actually have anything attached, at least as far as those
coming from the list have been concerned ...

For instance, one to -hackers that I just received with a subject of
"Details" was 3.2k ... based on my personal mailbox, if the virus was
actually attached, it would have been >100k in size ...



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Re: [GENERAL] Mail server load

2003-08-20 Thread Paul Thomas
On 20/08/2003 08:18 Nigel J. Andrews wrote:


Marc, I'd be interested in seeing the updated stats for this bought of
virus
transmission we're going through.
Yesterday you had almost 1 for 1 valid email. By then I think I was
getting
about 3-4 per valid email but since then it's sky rocketed and it looks
more
like 30+ per 1 valid message.
I'd just be interested if that's the same others are seeing since I
believe the
virus picks up my email address from the messages sent to the lists.
There's a few come thru the list to me and I had a few more yesterday as 
part of the daily spam. Like most people from the non-M$ world, this sort 
of thing just passes me by :)

--
Paul Thomas
+--+-+
| Thomas Micro Systems Limited | Software Solutions for the Smaller 
Business |
| Computer Consultants | 
http://www.thomas-micro-systems-ltd.co.uk   |
+--+-+

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Re: [GENERAL] Mail server load

2003-08-20 Thread The Hermit Hacker
On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Paul Thomas wrote:

> There's a few come thru the list to me and I had a few more yesterday as
> part of the daily spam. Like most people from the non-M$ world, this sort
> of thing just passes me by :)

I'm looking into how to add a 'taboo subject' filter onto the mj2 lists
themselves ... right now, I have a personal filter on:

elsif anyof (header :contains ["Subject"] "Approved",
 header :contains ["Subject"] "Thank you!",
 header :contains ["Subject"] "That movie",
 header :contains ["Subject"] "Your details",
 header :contains ["Subject"] "Wicked screensaver") {
 fileinto "INBOX.garbage";
}

I can't think of anyone using anything but *maybe* the Approved one in
their Subject, so there shouldn't be too many false positives ...
hopefully hear something from the mj2 guys relatively soon ...

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Re: [GENERAL] native win32 version

2003-08-20 Thread Robert Treat
On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 02:17, Christian Traber wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> sometime ago I heard that there will be a native win32 version of 
> postgresql 7.4.
> Is this true or will there only be a cygwin version like now?
> 

The native win32 port has been pushed back from 7.4 into (hopefully)
7.5, but cygwin version will still be available as always.

> What do you think, how stable and fast is the cygwin version?
> 

Well, some people do run in in production using the cygwin version, so
it is stable enough and fast enough for some folks. I don't think you'll
ever see a recommendation from the development group to run postgresql
on windows over a *nix OS for production purposes (even when native
win32 comes about, theres just too much lacking in windows) however for
development purposes it should be more than fine.

Robert Treat
-- 
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL


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Re: [GENERAL] Mail server load

2003-08-20 Thread Robert Treat
On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 08:11, The Hermit Hacker wrote:
> On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Paul Thomas wrote:
> 
> > There's a few come thru the list to me and I had a few more yesterday as
> > part of the daily spam. Like most people from the non-M$ world, this sort
> > of thing just passes me by :)
> 
> I'm looking into how to add a 'taboo subject' filter onto the mj2 lists
> themselves ... right now, I have a personal filter on:
> 
> elsif anyof (header :contains ["Subject"] "Approved",
>  header :contains ["Subject"] "Thank you!",
>  header :contains ["Subject"] "That movie",
>  header :contains ["Subject"] "Your details",
>  header :contains ["Subject"] "Wicked screensaver") {
>  fileinto "INBOX.garbage";
> }
> 
> I can't think of anyone using anything but *maybe* the Approved one in
> their Subject, so there shouldn't be too many false positives ...
> hopefully hear something from the mj2 guys relatively soon ...

Little does Marc know that the guys from 20th Century Fox have just
scrapped their idea to do a "History of PostgreSQL" move after repeated
attempts to contact anyone on the mailing lists never got through ;-)

Robert Treat 
-- 
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL


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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Bruno Wolff III
On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 21:51:14 -0400,
  Vivek Khera <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> I'm not promoting any change in the MVCC.  What I'm saying is that it
> would be really cool if the backend process itself could recognize
> that a row is no longer referenced by any transactions upon
> termination of the transaction, and release it back to the system.
> This is just what vacuum does but in a batched manner.  I would love
> to see it incremental.  This would result in pretty much near zero
> internal fragmentation, I think.

Why do you care about about the details of the implementation (rather than
the performance)? If it were faster to do it that way, that's how it would
have been done in the first place. The cost of doing the above is almost
certainly going to be an overall performance loser.

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[GENERAL] uptime problem

2003-08-20 Thread Vasili G. Yanov

 I have trouble: when client-program broke connection to Postgre I see
in logs:

 FATAL:  This connection has been terminated by the administrator.
 LOG:  shutting down

 and I must start Postgre again. Postgre starting as:

 pg_ctl -D /usr/local/pgdata -o \"-S\" start

 I have PostgreSQL 7.3.4 (build from FreeBSD ports).

 Whats wrong?

 Thanks in advance!



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Re: [GENERAL] uptime problem

2003-08-20 Thread Shridhar Daithankar
On Wednesday 20 August 2003 18:51, Vasili G. Yanov wrote:
>  I have trouble: when client-program broke connection to Postgre I see
> in logs:
>
>  FATAL:  This connection has been terminated by the administrator.
>  LOG:  shutting down
>
>  and I must start Postgre again. Postgre starting as:
>
>  pg_ctl -D /usr/local/pgdata -o \"-S\" start

If you get rid of that  -S and specify a logfile, I am sure you will find 
something in logs that would help you.

Discardign logs is not a good idea in general. Not especially if you have 
problems..

 Shridhar


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Re: [GENERAL] Thank you!

2003-08-20 Thread ler
Please see the attached file for details.
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Re: [GENERAL] uptime problem

2003-08-20 Thread Shridhar Daithankar
On Wednesday 20 August 2003 19:01, Vasili G. Yanov wrote:
> >>  I have trouble: when client-program broke connection to Postgre I see
> >> in logs:
> >>
> >>  FATAL:  This connection has been terminated by the administrator.
> >>  LOG:  shutting down
> >>
> >>  and I must start Postgre again. Postgre starting as:
> >>
> >>  pg_ctl -D /usr/local/pgdata -o \"-S\" start
>
> SD> If you get rid of that  -S and specify a logfile, I am sure you will
> find SD> something in logs that would help you.
>
> SD> Discardign logs is not a good idea in general. Not especially if you
> have SD> problems..
>
> I store all logs in syslog.

Hmm.. Looking at the error message again, looks like somebody is killing 
postmaster.

Is there any other script which is trying to kick in?

HTH

 Shridhar


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Re: [GENERAL] Thank you!

2003-08-20 Thread alvherre
See the attached file for details
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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Vivek Khera
> "BW" == Bruno Wolff,  writes:

>> to see it incremental.  This would result in pretty much near zero
>> internal fragmentation, I think.

BW> Why do you care about about the details of the implementation (rather than
BW> the performance)? If it were faster to do it that way, that's how it would
BW> have been done in the first place. The cost of doing the above is almost
BW> certainly going to be an overall performance loser.

I care for the performance.  And how are you so sure that it was
faster the way it is now?  Are you sure it was not done this way
because of ease of implementation?

Seriously, how much slower can it be if the backend were to do the
checking for external references upon updating/deleting a row?  The
cost would be distributed across time as opposed to concentrated at
once within a vacuum process.  I am fairly certian it would reduce
disk bandwidth requirements since at least one necessary page will
already be in memory.

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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Bruno Wolff III
On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 10:31:25 -0400,
  Vivek Khera <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 
> I care for the performance.  And how are you so sure that it was
> faster the way it is now?  Are you sure it was not done this way
> because of ease of implementation?
> 
> Seriously, how much slower can it be if the backend were to do the
> checking for external references upon updating/deleting a row?  The
> cost would be distributed across time as opposed to concentrated at
> once within a vacuum process.  I am fairly certian it would reduce
> disk bandwidth requirements since at least one necessary page will
> already be in memory.

It would probably be a lot slower. Any transaction that has started
but not yet finished would need to lock all rows that exist at during
the transaction (for serialized transaction isolation you would only
need to worry about rows that existed at the start of the transaction
or that were modified by the transaction). Immediately that is a big
deal since a typical query may need to lock a bunch of rows that it
will never actually touch (but you don't know that when the transaction
starts). Managing all those locks would take up a lot of semiconductor 
memory or a lot of disk writes and be a major source of contention.
The current system just has to mark rows when they are created and
deleted (an update does both operations). The normal vacuum clean up
actually isn't going to be much worse than what you would need to do
at both the start and end of each transaction. The overhead of letting
dead rows hang around for a while after they aren't needed isn't that high.

Also, since at least 7.3, normal vacuums aren't normally going to affect the
performance of your database server that much.

The main issue against the current vacuum system is that it requires the
DBA knowing what vacuum does and figuring out how it should be used in
their situation to get reasonable performance. This makes it a bit harder
for non-DBAs to jump right in to Postgres without running into problems.

However, the work on autovacuum seems to be providing a reasonable solution
to that problem.

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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Alvaro Herrera
On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 10:31:25AM -0400, Vivek Khera wrote:

> Seriously, how much slower can it be if the backend were to do the
> checking for external references upon updating/deleting a row?  The
> cost would be distributed across time as opposed to concentrated at
> once within a vacuum process.  I am fairly certian it would reduce
> disk bandwidth requirements since at least one necessary page will
> already be in memory.

There's no way to check for "external references", because said
references are actually the running transactions.  So you can't drop a
row until all the transactions that were active during your transaction
are finished.  Certainly your own backend can't do the checking, because
there's no way to even assert that it will be live when those other
transactions finish.  Who will?  The last of said transactions?  It
certainly will be expensive for a backend to keep track of the
deleted/updated tuples by all _other_ backends, just in case...
Long running transactions can't be neglected, so you can't keep it in
memory.

INVHO the solution to this problem will come in the form of a
autovaccum daemon integrated into the backend...

-- 
Alvaro Herrera ()
"Ninguna manada de bestias tiene una voz tan horrible como la humana" (Orual)

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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread scott.marlowe
On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Vivek Khera wrote:

> > "BW" == Bruno Wolff,  writes:
> 
> >> to see it incremental.  This would result in pretty much near zero
> >> internal fragmentation, I think.
> 
> BW> Why do you care about about the details of the implementation (rather than
> BW> the performance)? If it were faster to do it that way, that's how it would
> BW> have been done in the first place. The cost of doing the above is almost
> BW> certainly going to be an overall performance loser.
> 
> I care for the performance.  And how are you so sure that it was
> faster the way it is now?  Are you sure it was not done this way
> because of ease of implementation?
> 
> Seriously, how much slower can it be if the backend were to do the
> checking for external references upon updating/deleting a row?  The
> cost would be distributed across time as opposed to concentrated at
> once within a vacuum process.  I am fairly certian it would reduce
> disk bandwidth requirements since at least one necessary page will
> already be in memory.

Time for a mental exercise.

Our server has 2 users.  Each backend has to check with all the other 
backends when it deletes a tuple (every update is also a delete, remember 
every change in an MVCC database is a create / delte cycle.)  Let's create 
a name for the time it takes to do the update / mark deleted versus the 
time it takes to contact each of those other backends.  Tw is the Time to 
do the work here, and Tc is the time to do the cleanup (i.e. vacuum the 
tuple)  Note that we'd also need a Ta for answering the requests of all 
the other backends, but we can assume that on average, for each request a 
child process makes, it will receive exactly that many from each other 
backend running.  Let x represent the number of backends.  So the answer 
time is equal to x*Tc

Time = Tw + Tc + Ta

Time = Tw + Tc + (x * Tc)

Time = Tw + ((x+1) * Tc)

and our cleanup time starts to grow at an ugly rate as the number of 
backends increases.  Lazy vacuuming allows the database to reclaim lost 
space in the background, as the newer non-full vacuum does.

Many folks mistake this vacuum process for its older, slower cousin, full 
vacuum, which does eat a lot more disk bandwidth and slow the machine 
down.

On a Dual CPU X86 box a lazy vacuum running in a continuous loop will eat 
about 5% of one CPU and drop pgbench scores by 10 to 15%.  The important 
thing here, is that the machine will still run quite snappily when you 
throw several hundred clients at it, since the lazy vacuum just sits in 
the background using the spare cycles and not much more.

that means your storage usage may baloon somewhat under intense usage, but 
you won't have an IPC storm kill the performance of the postgresql server.  

Knowing the postgresql development team, I'm sure the reasons they chose 
are clearly stated in the hackers mailing list somewhere in time, so I'm 
gonna go look, but trust me on one thing, the guys programming this 
database don't do much because it's easier / faster to implement without 
putting something in the TODO list about making it better some day.


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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Tom Lane
Vivek Khera <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> "JW" == Jan Wieck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> JW> remove all the index entries pointing to these ctid's. Your idea is (so 
> JW> far) lacking a place where to remember all the single removed rows and I
> JW> assume you're not planning to pay the cost of a full scan over all 
> JW> indexes of a table to reclaim the space of one data row, are you?

> Well, that pretty much kills my idea...  back to autovacuum ;-)

In addition to the index-cleanup issue that Jan explained, there are
locking problems.  The tuple-is-dead hint bit mechanism is very
carefully designed so that a backend can set the hint bits while holding
only a shared lock on the page containing the tuple.  Physically
removing a tuple requires a far stronger lock (see the source code for
details).  Thus, having ordinary interactive backends remove tuples
would have bad consequences for concurrent performance.

But I think the real point here is that there's no reason to think that
doing tuple deletion on-the-fly in foreground transactions is superior
to doing it in background with a vacuum process.  You're taking what
should be noncritical maintenance work and moving it into the critical
paths of your foreground applications.  Not only that, but you're
probably doing more total work per tuple --- VACUUM "batches" its work
in more ways than just the index cleanup aspect, IIRC.

regards, tom lane

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[GENERAL] Collation rules and multi-lingual databases

2003-08-20 Thread Greg Stark

My understanding is that the entire set of localization parameters needs to be
decided upon when the initdb is done and can never be changed later. Is that
right?

I have a multi-lingual web site, I want to be able to sort using collation
rules for en_US, en_CA, and fr_CA depending on the current web site user.
There's no way I can do a database query to do these sorts is there?

-- 
greg


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Re: [GENERAL] Grouping by date range

2003-08-20 Thread Tom Lane
Bruno Wolff III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 13:44:59 -0500,
>   Ron Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> The GROUP BY does implicit sorting, so an ORDER BY on the exact same
>> column(s) as the GROUP BY is redundant.

> That is an implementation detail, not a promise. With hashed aggregates
> in 7.4, you might find this isn't true.

s/might/will/

regards, tom lane

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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Tom Lane
Stephan Szabo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> True, but the message being responded to was specifically "if the backend
> were to do the checking for external references upon updating/deleting a
> row".

It's clearly impossible for a backend to remove a row immediately upon
updating/deleting it, since it cannot know whether it will succeed in
committing its transaction.  The implementable variant of this would
correspond to extending the check-whether-committed-deleted code to see
whether a previously deleted tuple is now removable --- that is, moving
VACUUM's processing of the tuple into the main line.

> In any case, I thought it only does the committed deleted stuff
> when it comes upon a row in a scan, which means that it's still not
> automatic clean up in general since any particular deleted row may not get
> looked at for some amount of time after all possible viewers are gone.

Recall also that "committed deleted" does not mean "safe to remove".
There may still be live transactions that could see the tuple.  The
"committed deleted" bit just exists to allow subsequent visitors to the
row to skip one of the more expensive steps in deciding whether they can
see it or not.

To determine that a row is removable requires additional tests above and
beyond what backends normally do.

regards, tom lane

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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Jan Wieck
Tom Lane wrote:

Recall also that "committed deleted" does not mean "safe to remove".
There may still be live transactions that could see the tuple.  The
"committed deleted" bit just exists to allow subsequent visitors to the
row to skip one of the more expensive steps in deciding whether they can
see it or not.
To determine that a row is removable requires additional tests above and
beyond what backends normally do.
Aah - there is the first bullet hole in my multi-ctid-index-idea. Now 
the question becomes how expensive these tests are (if a normal backend 
can do them at all within reason)?

Jan

--
#==#
# It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than for being right. #
# Let's break this rule - forgive me.  #
#== [EMAIL PROTECTED] #
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Re: [GENERAL] 7.4b1 vs 7.3.4 performance

2003-08-20 Thread Tom Lane
"P.J. \"Josh\" Rovero" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 7.4b1 is significantly faster (i.e., the higher curve)
> over this range of clients and transactions.

Cool.  I wonder though why the 7.4 curve is so much noisier.

regards, tom lane

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Re: [GENERAL] Mail server load

2003-08-20 Thread Dennis Gearon
holy S**T!!

The Hermit Hacker wrote:

16:00 ...

neptune# awk '{print $7}' /var/log/amavisd | sort | uniq -c
 285 BAD
1807 BANNED
12289 INFECTED
11731 Passed,
   5 SA
   1 turned
Here's a normal day:

neptune# cat /var/log/amavisd.o | grep "Aug 17" | awk '{print $7}' | sort
| uniq -c
 332 BAD
  13 BANNED
 938 INFECTED
3792 Passed,


On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Tom Lane wrote:


"Nigel J. Andrews" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

Yesterday you had almost 1 for 1 valid email. By then I think I was getting
about 3-4 per valid email but since then it's sky rocketed and it looks more
like 30+ per 1 valid message.
FWIW, this is what I see in traffic to an address I've had to abandon
because of spam:
488 Aug 8
433 Aug 9
435 Aug 10
426 Aug 11
504 Aug 12
458 Aug 13
469 Aug 14
390 Aug 15
433 Aug 16
371 Aug 17
520 Aug 18
36473 Aug 19
35808 Aug 20
It's about 3pm local time here, so by midnight the stat for today will
probably be nearly double yesterday's total.
The spam traffic had been around 2K/day at the beginning of the year,
but tapered off to around 500 as you see above.  This spike is ten times
the highest I've seen before.  If I were actually downloading this crap,
and not rejecting it at the SMTP handshake, my DSL line would be
saturated :-(
			regards, tom lane

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Marc G. Fournier   ICQ#7615664   IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: [EMAIL PROTECTED]   secondary: [EMAIL PROTECTED]|postgresql}.org
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Re: [GENERAL] Grouping by date range

2003-08-20 Thread Ron Johnson
On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 14:51, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruno Wolff III <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 13:44:59 -0500,
> >   Ron Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >> The GROUP BY does implicit sorting, so an ORDER BY on the exact same
> >> column(s) as the GROUP BY is redundant.
> 
> > That is an implementation detail, not a promise. With hashed aggregates
> > in 7.4, you might find this isn't true.
> 
> s/might/will/


>From 7.3.3, where the records were randomly inserted; note how
GROUP BY acts like I described:

test1=# select f, count(*)
test1-# from t
test1-# group by f;
f | count
---+---
1 | 3
2 | 5
4 | 4
(3 rows)

The new 7.4 attitude is *really* good to know, because, otherwise,
all our reports would break!


-- 
-
Ron Johnson, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jefferson, LA USA

"Fair is where you take your cows to be judged."
Unknown


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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Tom Lane
Jan Wieck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Aah - there is the first bullet hole in my multi-ctid-index-idea. Now 
> the question becomes how expensive these tests are (if a normal backend 
> can do them at all within reason)?

It's not hugely expensive, IIRC, you just need to make some additional
checks against global xmin (compare HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum against
the others).  We're already doing something similar for the optimization
that suppresses subsequent heap lookups for globally-dead index tuples.

I'm dubious about the multi-ctid idea though because it would mean
bloating the index tuple header, whether there was any use for multiple
entries or not.  (Could we make the header variable size?  Not sure it's
worth the trouble.)

regards, tom lane

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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Andrew Sullivan
On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 12:40:03PM -0400, Vivek Khera wrote:
> > "BW" == Bruno Wolff,  writes:
> BW> Also, since at least 7.3, normal vacuums aren't normally going to
> BW> affect the performance of your database server that much.
> 
> I disagree.  Triggering a vacuum on a db that is nearly saturating the
> disk bandwidth has a significant impact.

Vivek is right about this.  If your system is already very busy, then
a vacuum on a largish table is painful.

I don't actually think having the process done in real time will
help, though -- it seems to me what would be more useful is an even
lazier vacuum: something that could be told "clean up as cycles are
available, but make sure you stay out of the way."  Of course, that's
easy to say glibly, and mighty hard to do, I expect.

A

-- 

Andrew Sullivan 204-4141 Yonge Street
Liberty RMS   Toronto, Ontario Canada
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  M2P 2A8
 +1 416 646 3304 x110


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[GENERAL] Changed mailing list functionality?

2003-08-20 Thread Ron Johnson
Hi,

Up until a few days ago, when I did a "Reply to List" in my MUA
(Evolution 1.4.4), only [EMAIL PROTECTED] would show
up in the "To:" list.  Now, "Reply to List" acts like like "Reply
to All".

The reason I bring this up in [EMAIL PROTECTED] is that
"Reply to List" still acts properly wrt [EMAIL PROTECTED],
so if it *is* a bug in Evo 1.4.4, it's not a pervasive bug.

Sincerely,
Ron
-- 
-
Ron Johnson, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jefferson, LA USA

YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer's strength flows from code 
maintainability. But beware of Perl. Terse syntax... more 
than one way to do it...default variables. The dark side of code 
maintainability are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you 
when code you write. If once you start down the dark path, 
forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.


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Re: [GENERAL] Changed mailing list functionality?

2003-08-20 Thread The Hermit Hacker

we haven't changed any of the list configs in months ...

On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Up until a few days ago, when I did a "Reply to List" in my MUA
> (Evolution 1.4.4), only [EMAIL PROTECTED] would show
> up in the "To:" list.  Now, "Reply to List" acts like like "Reply
> to All".
>
> The reason I bring this up in [EMAIL PROTECTED] is that
> "Reply to List" still acts properly wrt [EMAIL PROTECTED],
> so if it *is* a bug in Evo 1.4.4, it's not a pervasive bug.
>
> Sincerely,
> Ron
> --
> -
> Ron Johnson, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Jefferson, LA USA
>
> YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer's strength flows from code
> maintainability. But beware of Perl. Terse syntax... more
> than one way to do it...default variables. The dark side of code
> maintainability are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you
> when code you write. If once you start down the dark path,
> forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.
>
>
> ---(end of broadcast)---
> TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend
>

Marc G. Fournier   ICQ#7615664   IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: [EMAIL PROTECTED]   secondary: [EMAIL PROTECTED]|postgresql}.org

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TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster


Re: [GENERAL] Changed mailing list functionality?

2003-08-20 Thread Ron Johnson
On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 15:57, The Hermit Hacker wrote:
> we haven't changed any of the list configs in months ...

Ok, thanks.

> On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > Up until a few days ago, when I did a "Reply to List" in my MUA
> > (Evolution 1.4.4), only [EMAIL PROTECTED] would show
> > up in the "To:" list.  Now, "Reply to List" acts like like "Reply
> > to All".
> >
> > The reason I bring this up in [EMAIL PROTECTED] is that
> > "Reply to List" still acts properly wrt [EMAIL PROTECTED],
> > so if it *is* a bug in Evo 1.4.4, it's not a pervasive bug.
> >
> > Sincerely,
> > Ron
> >

-- 
-
Ron Johnson, Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jefferson, LA USA

"For me and windows it became a matter of easy to start with, 
and becoming increasingly difficult to be productive as time 
went on, and if something went wrong very difficult to fix, 
compared to linux's large over head setting up and learning the 
system with ease of use and the increase in productivity 
becoming larger the longer I use the system."
Rohan Nicholls , The Netherlands


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[GENERAL]

2003-08-20 Thread zoop
I upgraded to 7.3.3 from 7.2 something.  I guess the insert statment no longer
accepts a zero lenght string like ''
ERROR:  pg_atoi: zero-length string

Is there a way to make this work so it will put Null in the place of it? 



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Re: [GENERAL] move to usenet?

2003-08-20 Thread David W Noon
On Tuesday 19 Aug 2003 15:43 in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Chris M
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:

> I use outlook express to visit news.postgresql.org now.
> It works well.

Thank you for top-posting and full-quoting, just to prove my point. ... :-)

-- 
Regards,

Dave  [RLU#314465]
==
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (David W Noon)
Remove spam trap to reply via e-mail.
==

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Re: [GENERAL] Example Database

2003-08-20 Thread Erwin Brandstetter
OK. I understand that you prefer a different approach. For my part, I 
like to combine different approaches. I understand also that you 
consider it impossible to put all the stuff into one database. I think 
it is possible after all, but that is not the point here.

My request remains. I am looking for example databases that demonstrate 
good style in using and combining the features of PostgreSQL. I am sure 
there is something out there in the net. Would somebody be so kind to 
point me there?

Regards, Erwin



Jamie Lawrence wrote:
On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Dustin Sallings wrote:


Postgres has enough features that I would guess you're not going to 
find a database that uses all of them.

You'll probably find it a lot easier to learn postgres by thinking 
of something you want to do and trying to solve the problem with postgres. 
I find it really difficult to learn a new development tool without 
having a particular problem to solve.


I almost chimed in earlier, but I'd certainly second this. 

As far as the freedom Postgres offers in terms of flexibility of design,
there's no way any single DB will illustrate it well.
I started off using it becuase it was a real database in the free space,
and then started using other features when they made sense.
The ORDB stuff I've only used once; I have to admit that I like a fully
relational database. But there are cases I haven't seen...
The views/rules/triggers capability is priceless. Or, rather, Oracle
will put a price on it for you, which is significantly more than
Postgres.
Play with it.

-j


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Re: [GENERAL] move to usenet?

2003-08-20 Thread David W Noon
On Tuesday 19 Aug 2003 09:06 in
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Jules Alberts
([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:

> This is not a troll and I certainly don't want to start a holy war but
> wouldn't it be a good idea to move the postgresql lists from the
> mailing list approach to usenet?

I don't know about anybody else, but I am already reading these messages
from a Usenet newsserver. I do not receive them as e-mail.

I agree that many messages are not formatted according to Usenet
conventions, but I normally attribute that to Windows users who know
nothing about the Internet. Thus, top-posting and full-quoting are rife all
across Usenet.

-- 
Regards,

Dave  [RLU#314465]
==
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (David W Noon)
Remove spam trap to reply via e-mail.
==

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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Jan Wieck
Andrew Sullivan wrote:

On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 12:40:03PM -0400, Vivek Khera wrote:
> "BW" == Bruno Wolff,  writes:
BW> Also, since at least 7.3, normal vacuums aren't normally going to
BW> affect the performance of your database server that much.
I disagree.  Triggering a vacuum on a db that is nearly saturating the
disk bandwidth has a significant impact.
Vivek is right about this.  If your system is already very busy, then
a vacuum on a largish table is painful.
I don't actually think having the process done in real time will
help, though -- it seems to me what would be more useful is an even
lazier vacuum: something that could be told "clean up as cycles are
available, but make sure you stay out of the way."  Of course, that's
easy to say glibly, and mighty hard to do, I expect.
What about a little hint to the buffer management that if it has to 
evict another buffer to physically read this one (meaning the buffer 
pool was full already) then it will not put this buffer at the top of 
the LRU chain but rather at it's end? This way a vacuum on a large table 
will not cause a complete cache eviction.

Might be a useful hint for sequential scans too.

Jan

--
#==#
# It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than for being right. #
# Let's break this rule - forgive me.  #
#== [EMAIL PROTECTED] #
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Re: [GENERAL] Collation rules and multi-lingual databases

2003-08-20 Thread Tom Lane
Greg Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> My understanding is that the entire set of localization parameters needs to be
> decided upon when the initdb is done and can never be changed later. Is that
> right?

No, not all of them are frozen.  Unfortunately, the one you care about
(LC_COLLATE) is.  The reason for this is that it determines index
ordering for textual columns, and so changing LC_COLLATE on the fly
produces instant corrupt indexes :-(

A solution for this is on the TODO list, but don't hold your breath ...

regards, tom lane

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Re: [GENERAL] Mailing list in French

2003-08-20 Thread Francois Suter
Well, the idea of mailing list is to exchange information and help 
each other.
Obviously if few great things happen on some mailing list and others 
don't come
to know it, defeats the purpose of having a mailing list.
I agree. This is one of my worries. If nothing happens on the French 
list, it will be an empty shell. Then again, there seems to be a demand 
for something not in English. So here goes and let's just hope it will 
work out.

As an experiment can we have a translation gateway so that these two 
lists, in
general and french-general can interact? I mean the idea should be to 
help
people getting communicate better rather than having a separate list 
as such.
That would be nice, but how could we go about that?

Cheers

---
Francois
Home page: http://www.monpetitcoin.com/

"Would Descartes have programmed in Pascal?" - Umberto Eco

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Re: [GENERAL] Mail server load

2003-08-20 Thread Nigel J. Andrews
On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Dennis Gearon wrote:

> holy S**T!!

Particularly the 'Passed' number. Now I'm not subscribed to all of the lists
but I am on -general, -hackers and a couple of others like -interfaces and yet
I would say that the volume of email I'm seeing from the lists is far lower
than normal _not_ more by a factor of 3-ish.

BTW, I wasn't suggesting the virus emails I get come through the lists, was
just refering to the harvesting of my email address by the virus.

[Tom's numbers are absolutely amazing. I seem to be up to around 60 per minute
now]

> 
> 
> The Hermit Hacker wrote:
> 
> > 16:00 ...
> > 
> > neptune# awk '{print $7}' /var/log/amavisd | sort | uniq -c
> >  285 BAD
> > 1807 BANNED
> > 12289 INFECTED
> > 11731 Passed,
> >5 SA
> >1 turned
> > 
> > Here's a normal day:
> > 
> > neptune# cat /var/log/amavisd.o | grep "Aug 17" | awk '{print $7}' | sort
> > | uniq -c
> >  332 BAD
> >   13 BANNED
> >  938 INFECTED
> > 3792 Passed,
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Tom Lane wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >>"Nigel J. Andrews" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >>
> >>>Yesterday you had almost 1 for 1 valid email. By then I think I was getting
> >>>about 3-4 per valid email but since then it's sky rocketed and it looks more
> >>>like 30+ per 1 valid message.
> >>
> >>FWIW, this is what I see in traffic to an address I've had to abandon
> >>because of spam:
> >>
> >> 488 Aug 8
> >> 433 Aug 9
> >> 435 Aug 10
> >> 426 Aug 11
> >> 504 Aug 12
> >> 458 Aug 13
> >> 469 Aug 14
> >> 390 Aug 15
> >> 433 Aug 16
> >> 371 Aug 17
> >> 520 Aug 18
> >>36473 Aug 19
> >>35808 Aug 20
> >>
> >>It's about 3pm local time here, so by midnight the stat for today will
> >>probably be nearly double yesterday's total.
> >>
> >>The spam traffic had been around 2K/day at the beginning of the year,
> >>but tapered off to around 500 as you see above.  This spike is ten times
> >>the highest I've seen before.  If I were actually downloading this crap,
> >>and not rejecting it at the SMTP handshake, my DSL line would be
> >>saturated :-(


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Re: [GENERAL] Collation rules and multi-lingual databases

2003-08-20 Thread Greg Stark
Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

> Greg Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > My understanding is that the entire set of localization parameters needs to be
> > decided upon when the initdb is done and can never be changed later. Is that
> > right?
> 
> No, not all of them are frozen.  Unfortunately, the one you care about
> (LC_COLLATE) is.  The reason for this is that it determines index
> ordering for textual columns, and so changing LC_COLLATE on the fly
> produces instant corrupt indexes :-(

Yeah, I really would be perfectly happy to have indexes be in "C" order and
have my queries have to specifically specify the sort order in the ORDER BY
clause, knowing they won't use the index.

Well, ok, not quite perfectly happy. But in this case there are no indexes on
the columns anyways so...

> A solution for this is on the TODO list, but don't hold your breath ...

-- 
greg


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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Tom Lane
Andrew Sullivan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> I disagree.  Triggering a vacuum on a db that is nearly saturating the
>> disk bandwidth has a significant impact.

> Vivek is right about this.  If your system is already very busy, then
> a vacuum on a largish table is painful.

> I don't actually think having the process done in real time will
> help, though -- it seems to me what would be more useful is an even
> lazier vacuum: something that could be told "clean up as cycles are
> available, but make sure you stay out of the way."  Of course, that's
> easy to say glibly, and mighty hard to do, I expect.

I'd love to be able to do that, but I can't think of a good way.

Just nice'ing the VACUUM process is likely to be counterproductive
because of locking issues (priority inversion).  Though if anyone cares
to try it on a heavily-loaded system, I'd be interested to hear the
results...

regards, tom lane

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Re: [GENERAL] Collation rules and multi-lingual databases

2003-08-20 Thread Dennis Gearon
I think it would be nice, and I may write it eventually, to have a 
function called:

COLLATION_VALUE( 'string', 'encoding' )

Which could be used like:

SELECT field_a, field_b
FROM table_a
GROUP BY COLLATION_VALUE( field_a )
ORDER BY COLLATION_VALUE( field_b );
or in other creative ways.

Greg Stark wrote:

Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

 

Greg Stark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
   

My understanding is that the entire set of localization parameters needs to be
decided upon when the initdb is done and can never be changed later. Is that
right?
 

No, not all of them are frozen.  Unfortunately, the one you care about
(LC_COLLATE) is.  The reason for this is that it determines index
ordering for textual columns, and so changing LC_COLLATE on the fly
produces instant corrupt indexes :-(
   

Yeah, I really would be perfectly happy to have indexes be in "C" order and
have my queries have to specifically specify the sort order in the ORDER BY
clause, knowing they won't use the index.
Well, ok, not quite perfectly happy. But in this case there are no indexes on
the columns anyways so...
 

A solution for this is on the TODO list, but don't hold your breath ...
   

 



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Re: [GENERAL] move to usenet?

2003-08-20 Thread David Olbersen
> -Original Message-
> From: David W Noon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2003 4:20 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [GENERAL] move to usenet?
> 
> I agree that many messages are not formatted according to Usenet
> conventions, but I normally attribute that to Windows users who know
> nothing about the Internet. Thus, top-posting and 
> full-quoting are rife all
> across Usenet.

David,

What is the point of bottom posting anymore? I thought it had to do with turn-around 
time so that you could re-read whatever it is you wrote a "long time ago". I highly 
doubt you would know, but is there an easy way to make Outlook 2000 (not Express) 
bottom post? I've searched groups.google.com for it and found only things like "Copy & 
paste your signature", etc.

Full-quoting is just a pain when it comes to searching on google, since a reply may 
only consist of quoted messages and then a "read the whole message" link.

--
David Olbersen 
iGuard Engineer
St. Bernard Software

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Re: [GENERAL] Mail server load

2003-08-20 Thread The Hermit Hacker
On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Nigel J. Andrews wrote:

> On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Dennis Gearon wrote:
>
> > holy S**T!!
>
> Particularly the 'Passed' number. Now I'm not subscribed to all of the lists
> but I am on -general, -hackers and a couple of others like -interfaces and yet
> I would say that the volume of email I'm seeing from the lists is far lower
> than normal _not_ more by a factor of 3-ish.

The # Passed is what amavisd passed through to majordomo2 ... majordomo2
then takes everything that amavisd marked as being spam and trashes those
... and then everything that is from ppl not subscribed to the lists has
to get approved by 'the moderator', which I'm currently going through ...
only 400 more to go, 399 of which are most likely stuff amavisd didn't
catch as spam *sigh*

Oh ... also consider that a *very* large portion of the messages that
Passed are also postmaster messages for messages bounced ... I have a
filter on my mail for that to put it into its own mailbox ... since Aug
18th, there have been 12622 messages delivered to that mailbox ... and
there is also all the subscribe/unsubscribe requests ... all of which
would have been Passed thorugh amavisd ...





 >
> >
> >
> > The Hermit Hacker wrote:
> >
> > > 16:00 ...
> > >
> > > neptune# awk '{print $7}' /var/log/amavisd | sort | uniq -c
> > >  285 BAD
> > > 1807 BANNED
> > > 12289 INFECTED
> > > 11731 Passed,
> > >5 SA
> > >1 turned
> > >
> > > Here's a normal day:
> > >
> > > neptune# cat /var/log/amavisd.o | grep "Aug 17" | awk '{print $7}' | sort
> > > | uniq -c
> > >  332 BAD
> > >   13 BANNED
> > >  938 INFECTED
> > > 3792 Passed,
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Tom Lane wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >>"Nigel J. Andrews" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > >>
> > >>>Yesterday you had almost 1 for 1 valid email. By then I think I was getting
> > >>>about 3-4 per valid email but since then it's sky rocketed and it looks more
> > >>>like 30+ per 1 valid message.
> > >>
> > >>FWIW, this is what I see in traffic to an address I've had to abandon
> > >>because of spam:
> > >>
> > >> 488 Aug 8
> > >> 433 Aug 9
> > >> 435 Aug 10
> > >> 426 Aug 11
> > >> 504 Aug 12
> > >> 458 Aug 13
> > >> 469 Aug 14
> > >> 390 Aug 15
> > >> 433 Aug 16
> > >> 371 Aug 17
> > >> 520 Aug 18
> > >>36473 Aug 19
> > >>35808 Aug 20
> > >>
> > >>It's about 3pm local time here, so by midnight the stat for today will
> > >>probably be nearly double yesterday's total.
> > >>
> > >>The spam traffic had been around 2K/day at the beginning of the year,
> > >>but tapered off to around 500 as you see above.  This spike is ten times
> > >>the highest I've seen before.  If I were actually downloading this crap,
> > >>and not rejecting it at the SMTP handshake, my DSL line would be
> > >>saturated :-(
>
>

Marc G. Fournier   ICQ#7615664   IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: [EMAIL PROTECTED]   secondary: [EMAIL PROTECTED]|postgresql}.org

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Re: [GENERAL] move to usenet?

2003-08-20 Thread Dennis Gearon
I prefer NOT to have to scroll down to the bottom of an email anyway. I 
think discussion list emails like ours need to be like your medical 
records, the most important, recent stuff is at the top.

I'm not exactly sure what full quoting is.

David Olbersen wrote:

-Original Message-
From: David W Noon [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2003 4:20 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] move to usenet?
I agree that many messages are not formatted according to Usenet
conventions, but I normally attribute that to Windows users who know
nothing about the Internet. Thus, top-posting and 
full-quoting are rife all
across Usenet.
   

David,

What is the point of bottom posting anymore? I thought it had to do with turn-around time so that you could re-read whatever it is you wrote a "long time ago". I highly doubt you would know, but is there an easy way to make Outlook 2000 (not Express) bottom post? I've searched groups.google.com for it and found only things like "Copy & paste your signature", etc.

Full-quoting is just a pain when it comes to searching on google, since a reply may only consist of quoted messages and then a "read the whole message" link.

--
David Olbersen 
iGuard Engineer
St. Bernard Software

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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Karsten Hilbert
> it seems to me what would be more useful is an even
> lazier vacuum: something that could be told "clean up as cycles are
> available, but make sure you stay out of the way."  Of course, that's
> easy to say glibly, and mighty hard to do, I expect.
You mean, like, "nice 19" or so ?

Karsten
-- 
GPG key ID E4071346 @ wwwkeys.pgp.net
E167 67FD A291 2BEA 73BD  4537 78B9 A9F9 E407 1346

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Re: [GENERAL] move to usenet?

2003-08-20 Thread Richard Welty
On Wed, 20 Aug 2003 14:44:28 -0700 David Olbersen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> What is the point of bottom posting anymore? I thought it had to do with
> turn-around time so that you could re-read whatever it is you wrote a
> "long time ago". I highly doubt you would know, but is there an easy way
> to make Outlook 2000 (not Express) bottom post? 

there are these powerful tools called mice and arrow keys. i find that they
work quite well if you want to bottom post in outlook.

cheers,
 richard
-- 
Richard Welty [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Averill Park Networking 518-573-7592
Java, PHP, PostgreSQL, Unix, Linux, IP Network Engineering, Security



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Re: [GENERAL] Buglist

2003-08-20 Thread Edmund Dengler
What about the use of priority inheritance to deal with the issue of
priority inversion (a standard methodology within the real-time world)?

Then we could have priorities, but still have low priority processes
bumped up if a high level one is waiting on them.

Regards,
Ed

On Wed, 20 Aug 2003, Tom Lane wrote:

> Andrew Sullivan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >> I disagree.  Triggering a vacuum on a db that is nearly saturating the
> >> disk bandwidth has a significant impact.
>
> > Vivek is right about this.  If your system is already very busy, then
> > a vacuum on a largish table is painful.
>
> > I don't actually think having the process done in real time will
> > help, though -- it seems to me what would be more useful is an even
> > lazier vacuum: something that could be told "clean up as cycles are
> > available, but make sure you stay out of the way."  Of course, that's
> > easy to say glibly, and mighty hard to do, I expect.
>
> I'd love to be able to do that, but I can't think of a good way.
>
> Just nice'ing the VACUUM process is likely to be counterproductive
> because of locking issues (priority inversion).  Though if anyone cares
> to try it on a heavily-loaded system, I'd be interested to hear the
> results...
>
>   regards, tom lane
>
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