Re: Slow header download on one group

[Katsumi Yamaoka]

>>>>> Patrick May wrote:

>      I see especially slow header downloads when accessing one
> particular newsgroup.  Even if that group shows only a dozen unread
> posts, it loads much more slowly than a groups with over a hundred.

>      elp shows the following for the fast groups:

> Function Name           Call Count  Elapsed Time  Average Time
> =====================  ==========  ============  ============
> gnus-retrieve-headers  3           5.690393      1.8967976666

[...]

> The slow group shows:

> Function Name           Call Count  Elapsed Time  Average Time
> =====================  ==========  ============  ============
> gnus-retrieve-headers  3           78.807254     26.269084666

> Could fragmentation in .newsrc.eld be the source of the problem?

I don't think so.  Though I haven't tried supernews.com, I guess
there might be a big gap between old article numbers and latest
ones in the server.  What does evaluating the following Lisp form
return?

(gnus-active "news.group.name")

It says for my local news server as:

(gnus-active "gnu.emacs.gnus")
 => (57391 . 59194)

but for news.motzarella.org it says:

(gnus-active "nntp+motzarella:gnu.emacs.gnus")
 => (156 . 30068314)

In the later case, Gnus consumes memory wastefully and takes time
while fetching headers even if there are no more than hundreds
articles.  For such cases Gnus offers a workaround.  If it is just
your case, try setting the `gnus-newsgroup-maximum-articles'
variable to a certain number.  For example:

(setq gnus-newsgroup-maximum-articles 10000)

It lets Gnus disregard old articles than the latest 10000
articles in all groups and work fast.

(This variable is not in the released version of Gnus and Emacs.)