Re: Huge memory consumption on accessing large newsgroup

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

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.

> BTW, I needed to set the server variable `nntp-authinfo-force'
> to t in order to let No Gnus v0.7 send the AUTHINFO data to the
> Motzarella server as follows:
>
> (nntp "motzarella"
>       (nntp-address "news.motzarella.org")
>       (nntp-authinfo-user "yamaoka")
>       (nntp-authinfo-password "********")
>       (nntp-authinfo-force t)
>       ...)
>
> I guess you have the FORCE element in the ~/.authinfo file since
> such a server variable has not been implemented yet in Gnus v5.11.

Yes, this is described in Motzarella's FAQ, you have to put a line

machine news.motzarella.org login xxxxxx force yes password xxxxxx

into ~/.authinfo.  Sorry for not explaining that in my bug report.

Cheers,
       Sven