Newsgroup caching

[Aidan Gauland]

Hi,

I have just switched to Gnus for email and news.  I have not used
newsgroups before, so Gnus is my first mail reader.  When I enter a
newsgroup with many messages (e.g. gnu.emacs.gnus) I get a message like...

How many articles from nntp+gnus:gnu.emacs.gnus (default 55071):

If I just hit return to accept the default, Gnus blocks the rest of
Emacs to get all some-odd thousand messages, even if I have already done
this previously.  In other words, Gnus does not seem to be caching
article headers.  I expected to have a long wait only the first time,
and only have to get new messages from then on.  Is this typical of
newsreaders, or do I need to explicitly enable caching in Gnus?  Or is
it that I should be giving it a smaller number of messages to retrieve?

Regards,
Aidan Gauland