I did a test with my ccd partition..  by rm -rf /var/spool/news/*
shown below are some stats.. "freelist misses" are way high.. and it's 
not done removing all the files at this point yet..

# df -k
Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/sd0a       18999    10356     7693    57%    /
/dev/sd0e      191383    92107    89706    51%    /usr
/dev/sd0f      708532   193036   480069    29%    /var
/dev/ccd0d    3895084   529744  3170585    14%    /var/spool/news
# ccdconfig -s
Statistics for ccd0:
        freelist count: 14
        freelist hiwater: 16
        freelist misses: 18360
        ccdbuf allocations: 331151


..............          ....................................
Thomas T. Thai          Infomedia Interactive Communications
tom@iic.net             TEL 612.376.9090 * FAX 612.376.9087