any tips for how to tune Gnus/emacs for low memory usage?

[Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no>]

Platform: GNU Emacs 20.7.2, Oort Gnus v0.04 (CVS update from october 6)
          using the nnimap and nntp backends, with Gnus agent,
          Intel P133, debian woody linux w/the 2.2.19 kernel

I'm running Gnus inside of GNU emacs under linux and XFree86, on what
today is a small machine: P133 with 24 MB of RAM (top reports 22724k
total.  Presumably the rest of the memory is taken by the kernel).

My problem is that things start to get slow when the size of the emacs
process approaches the size of the physical memory, and the system
starts paging at the drop of a hat.  What drives memory consumption up
to this level is in my case, opening the newsgroup no.alt.motorsykler.

In this group I have ticked some old articles, and since I'm using the
agent they never expire.  The group has a lot of traffic, which means
that Gnus have fill in all the empty space between the article numbers
when opening the group.

In addition I do a lot of scoring in this group.  I guess the followup
scoring of some persons really add to the cost.  I also do adaptive
scoring based on reading, and deleting of articles.

Is there anything I can try to keep the size of the Emacs process
down?  Stay completely away from groups with sparse article numbers?
Stay away from adaptive/followup scoring?

Or are there some variables I could try tuning to keep the memory
usage down?


- Steinar