low disk space followed by disk flogging

[pjcamp]

I have three main physical disks. C; is an SSD that I try to keep for OS related stuff only. Windows is such an organizational mess that isn't really possible but I try. D: is the main program file location and h: is for data.

A week ago, Newsbin slowed dramatically for a while. Then it told me I was running out of space on C:, where the app data is stored. I searched through the forum and found two things: I don't need SPOOL_V1 any more, just SPOOL_V6, and if I edit the location in newsbin.nbi I can move the app data location to D:. I did that and copied all files from C: to D:, then restarted Newsbin.

It has been behaving increasingly strangely ever since. First, when I asked it to download latest headers, it decided to download all of them instead. Then it would only display a tiny fraction, and that after a very long time. The next day I tried downloading more and saw only the ones that were there before. Many of the ones I can see were marked old months ago and are back again.

After fiddling with this for a while, I decided that if it was happy on C: I'd let it be on C:. There should be room after getting rid of SPOOL_V1 but I also cleaned up some download and cache folders to make sure.

Now it takes forever to display headers. In fact, it never gets that far. It starts flogging the D: drive relentlessly, which causes the whole system to freeze. I've done a cold boot twice today.

So either I did something wrong moving the data to D: and back to C:, or perhaps it was some sort of corruption issue and never a disk space problem at all. Right now, I'm thinking the solution is to just nuke it and start over. I'm using Newsbin Pro 64 v6.70: 00 F8 30 ED 20 41 on Windows 10 Home.

[pjcamp]

So I totally removed all vestiges of Newsbin from my system and started completely over. There was one cycle of good behavior. But the second time, asking to load headers lead once again to total monopolization of drives C: and D:, bringing the entire system to its knees.

There are 15 GB free space on C: and several hundred on D:. It shouldn't be having a problem finding storage space. And it didn't the first time. But the second time, it took hours to display headers, and never actually did, it just descended into disk flogging on both C: and D:, repeatedly accessing them and not allowing any other programs to do so until I killed the newsbin process. Then it was fine.

I'm flummoxed. Newsbin was really well behaved until 2 weeks ago and now it is completely nonfunctional and useless. Any ideas at all?

[dexter]

I guess you didn't see all the discussion about the massive spam flood throughout the month of January to many popular newsgroups. This is what is causing Newsbin to bog. The solution is to install header download filters. It's discussed in the latest Message of the Day

Full history of the discussion is in this Newsbin Forum thread

[pjcamp]

I guess you didn't see all the discussion about the massive spam flood throughout the month of January to many popular newsgroups. This is what is causing Newsbin to bog. The solution is to install header download filters. It's discussed in the latest Message of the Day

Full history of the discussion is in this Newsbin Forum thread

I did miss that. Duh. Thanks for the pointer!