Re: Gnus fetches too many headers WAS: Re: Showing Complete Active Threads

[Dale Worley]

Tassilo Horn <heimdall@uni-koblenz.de> writes:
> When I entered this Group Gnus started to fetch several megabytes and
> the output in *nntp-log* was
> 
> ,----[ *nntp-log* after entering infko.general with 3 new articles ]
> | 20060309T121041.752 news.uni-koblenz.de GROUP infko.general
> | 20060309T121041.926 news.uni-koblenz.de XOVER 1-61172
> `----
> 
> This newsgroup has medium traffic and I enter it several times a day, so
> all except the 3 new articles should have been available...
> 
> After the `g' I also had
> 
>       comp.emacs (1)
> 
> and entering this group resulted in
> 
> ,----[ *nntp-log* after entering comp.emacs with 1 new article ]
> | 20060309T121028.368 news.uni-koblenz.de GROUP comp.emacs
> | 20060309T121028.372 news.uni-koblenz.de XOVER 54834-54834
> `----
> 
> That looks quite ok to me.
> 
> So why does Gnus fetch all headers of infko.general but only the needed
> headers for comp.emacs?

I've had some problems like this myself.  I think the problem is that
your .newsrc doesn't record all the numbers from 1 to 61172 as being
already seen, and so Gnus attempts to fetch every header in the range
with a separate HEAD command.  It is possible that the news server is
not reporting the "minimum article number present" correctly, and so
Gnus is attempting to fetch articles starting with number 1.  I would
log in to the NNTP server using telnet and do a "GROUP infko.general"
and see what the results are.  You may want to manually edit .newsrc
to say "infko.general: 1-60000" or something like that.  At the least,
if you tell Gnus to only fetch 100 articles from the group (when it
asks), it should run correctly.

Dale

Dale Worley                                             worley@theworld.com
--
The sky is falling; damage estimate to follow.  -- "The West Wing"