Re: Huge memory consumption on accessing large newsgroup

[Gaute Strokkenes <gs234@srcf.ucam.org>]

On 10 aug 2007, svenjoac@gmx.de wrote:

> Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org> writes:
>
>> I visited http://news.motzarella.org/ and got an account on
>> Motzarella out of curiosity. ;-)
>>
>>> When accessing comp.os.linux.misc on news.motzarella.org, a _very_
>>> large newsgroup with more than 30,000,000 articles, Emacs' memory
>>> footprint grew heavily.
>>
>> Yes, now the ACTIVE of that group is:
>>
>> (gnus-active "nntp+motzarella:comp.os.linux.misc")
>> => (3437 . 30538699)
>>
>> However, I verified there are actually no more than less than
>> 3,000 articles.  It should not be a cause of this problem.
>
> I had already suspected the number is bogus and that they do not
> really keep 30 million articles for several newsgroups. ;-)
>
>> The real cause is that Gnus first expands this ACTIVE data into:
>>
>> (3437 3438 3439 3440 ...... 30538696 30538697 30538698 30538699)
>
> Aha, that's not exactly a small list, I see.

Sorry for following up on an ancient thread, but:

I wonder if it would be possible to make Gnus work solely with
compressed ranges (i.e. lists where dotted pairs are used to represent
runs of consecutive integers)?

Unless there is some deeper reason why this cannot work, I might have a
stab at it (eventually).

-- 
Gaute Strokkenes