Re: Gnus is very slow in displaying headers.

[Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de>]

Derrell.Lipman@UnwiredUniverse.com writes:

> Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de> writes:
>
>> Some people like to keep lots of articles marked as unread, especially
>> for mail, so that they do not lose track of the context.  But I think
>> that it works well to (setq gnus-fetch-old-headers t): this leads to
>> Gnus showing the complete thread, if there is an unread article in
>> that thread.  This way, I get the complete context of new discussions,
>> without having to keep all old articles of this discussion unread.
>
> I used to do that.  Based on a previous thread in the ding list about slow
> presentation of a group, I now have the following comment and setting in my
> .gnus file:
>
>     (setq
>      ;; Show headers of previous messages in a thread
>      ;; Don't do this; it greatly slows down presentation of the group
>      gnus-fetch-old-headers			nil
>     )
>
> My recollection was that the difference in speed, disabling this, was
> remarkable.

Well, what do I say about this?

Many people have many articles marked as unread.  It is faster to mark
them as read and (setq gnus-fetch-old-headers t) -- this tends to show
the "interesting" articles that people would otherwise mark as unread.

Obviously, not showing the "interesting" articles is faster still.
But then, people might tend to mark interesting articles as unread,
leading to 12,000 unread articles in a group, which leads to the
slowdown.

Kai