It's supposed to be big.  You want it to be big.  Don't ever run
makehistory to build a new database!  It will take hours or days
to run.  The resulting database will be smaller, but that's because
you have removed entries for expired articles, leaving yourself
vulnerable to duplicates.  It's hard to estimate exactly how much
you'll need, since it depends a lot on how much news you carry
as well as for how long.

The partition which holds your history datebase must have at least
enough room for two copies of the database, since expire(8) needs
to build a new one while the old one is still in use. If you can't 
afford free space on this partition for two copies, but have plenty
of space elsewhere, then you might use the "-d" flag to expire.

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