Re: News scan on startup vs 'g' in group buff

[Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com>]

Glyn Millington <glyn.millington@gmail.com> writes:

> What I still don't know is whether you tried what I suggested - a
> numerical argument to 'g' :-)  My suspicion was that Gnus was stuck on an
> active-file, and that would have helped confirm it (or not). The fact that
> removing defunct servers has loosened things up also tends that way.

Sorry, but the way you explained it before it sounded like it depended
on having groups at more than one level.  I guess you are saying I
could have just done C-u N g regardless of my setup eh?

But now with the problem seemingly cleared up, or at least enough to
make the `g' command usable I'm reluctant to try to much
experimenting. 

But just off the top of my head, if the problem was what you
suspected, something you called `a hard read of active file', wouldn't
that mean that in server buffer, forcing a read of active file would
hit the same giant pause.... but it never did.

Now, since 'g' seems to be working as expected, using C-u N 'g'
wouldn't really tell us much would it?

Trying it anyway, I discovered that called this way `C-u 3 g', I get
the big stall... I only let it run for 2 minutes... but it should
never take that long.

Then after C-g to stop the stall I pressed just 'g' with no numeric
argument and it completed in short order.

>> However, I'd still like to know how to watch the startup process (or
>> any other) and be able to see what calls are made etc.
>
> Well, if Those Who Know don't reply,  I guess the answer is to be found
> somewhere here:

>
> http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Debugger.html#Debugger

Yeah, probably but reading the sections `Explicit Debug' and `Using
Debugger'

The first seems to rely on my knowing where to insert `(debug)' in
source code, which, of course, I do not, and the second never discuses
how to start the debugger... just assumes you have it running.

There is a third and even more likely heading: `Invoking the debugger'
which oddly doesn't actually tell you how to invoke it by hand.  Maybe
it cannot just be started when desired like the perl debugger where
you just run a script with `perl -d'.

Further, the menus on emacs itself only have options to enter the
debugger on error or on quit.  Never just `enter debugger now'

I had visions of some command or evaluation before starting gnus that
would just show what it was doing in another buffer.... but apparently
there is no such possibility.

I have produced backtraces with this code in .gnus:

 (defadvice gnus-group-get-new-news (around gnus-timeout activate)
   "Timeout for Gnus."
   (with-timeout
       (40 (message "Gnus timed out.") (debug))
     ad-do-it))

With various amounts of seconds... above it is 40.

But the backtrace does not show hardly any info, just:

,----
|   Debugger entered: nil
|      gnus-group-get-new-news(nil)
|      call-interactively(gnus-group-get-new-news nil nil)
`----
Not exactly a fount of usable info.