switch to another window while gnus is busy

switch to another window while gnus is busy

[jidanni]

Why must gnus dominate the whole emacs? Why can't I switch to another
window while gnus is busy, like I can with emacs-w3m?

Re: switch to another window while gnus is busy

[David Engster]

jidanni@jidanni.org writes:
> Why must gnus dominate the whole emacs? Why can't I switch to another
> window while gnus is busy, like I can with emacs-w3m?

Because Gnus doesn't use external binaries which it could call
asynchronously, like emacs-w3m does with w3m.

-David

Re: switch to another window while gnus is busy

[Tassilo Horn]

jidanni@jidanni.org writes:

Hi!

> Why must gnus dominate the whole emacs? Why can't I switch to another
> window while gnus is busy, like I can with emacs-w3m?

Cause emacs-w3m uses an external process (w3m) and therefore gains some
sort of parallelism while Gnus does does the processing in emacs lisp
which has no parellelism (at least currently).

Hope that helps,
Tassilo

Re: switch to another window while gnus is busy

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:56:05 +0800 jidanni@jidanni.org wrote: 

j> Why must gnus dominate the whole emacs? Why can't I switch to another
j> window while gnus is busy, like I can with emacs-w3m?

There's a discussion about adding multithreading to Emacs in the
emacs-devel mailing list.  You can voice your support for that work or
contribute to it.  Without multithreading Gnus must be synchronous.  See
some posts, including mine, in that thread listing reasons.

What exactly is slow for you?  Obviously we all have our specific Gnus
setups, so I think it's useful to find the slow spots that affect all
users, not just the developers.

Ted

nnrss slow [was: switch to another window while gnus is busy]

[jidanni]

>>>>> "TZ" == Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

TZ> There's a discussion about adding multithreading to Emacs in the
TZ> emacs-devel mailing list.  You can voice your support for that work or
TZ> contribute to it.  Without multithreading Gnus must be synchronous.  See
TZ> some posts, including mine, in that thread listing reasons.
OK, looks complex.

TZ> What exactly is slow for you?  Obviously we all have our specific Gnus
TZ> setups, so I think it's useful to find the slow spots that affect all
TZ> users, not just the developers.

OK, only nnrss of course. And it's not really the network part. Before
it starts its HTTP requests, just look at the CPU meter! With the
following the rss fetching is isolated, proving nnrss is the culprit
munching the CPU meter.

(defun jidanni-gnus-group-get-new-rss-news()
  "Sorry attempt to seperate out painful RSS fetching."
  (let ((gnus-activate-foreign-newsgroups 5))
    (gnus-group-get-new-news)))
(define-key gnus-group-mode-map "v"
  (lambda ()
    (interactive)
    (jidanni-gnus-group-get-new-rss-news)))

Anyway I was thinking of a batch job: once a day run
$ emacs -f nnrss-generate-download-script|sh
which would dynamically reflect my current nnrss groups. However one
finds that one needs to have already ran nnrss, else
nnrss-generate-download-script will only make three lines of headers.

Re: nnrss slow

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 09:34:18 +0800 jidanni@jidanni.org wrote: 

j> Anyway I was thinking of a batch job: once a day run
j> $ emacs -f nnrss-generate-download-script|sh
j> which would dynamically reflect my current nnrss groups. However one
j> finds that one needs to have already ran nnrss, else
j> nnrss-generate-download-script will only make three lines of headers.

I like nntp/rss better for this since I can just use it as a NNTP
server, personally, but I agree asynchronous fetching of RSS feeds would
be nice.

Ted

Re: nnrss slow

[Steinar Bang]

>>>>> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>:

> I like nntp/rss better for this since I can just use it as a NNTP
> server, personally,

Hmm... neat: http://www.methodize.org/nntprss/

> but I agree asynchronous fetching of RSS feeds would be nice.

Does it poll the RSS stream when you read the corresponding NNTP group?

There's a script linked to from the home page that appearently pulls
articles from nntp//rss groups, and feeds them to groups on an INN
server. 

That's a possibility for a larger site, but seems like a bit of overkill
for a personal setup.

Re: nnrss slow

[jidanni]

SB> Hmm... neat: http://www.methodize.org/nntprss/
$ apt-cache search rss|grep -i nntp|wc -l
0
Hmm, no Debian package, and I must install Java.
$ w3m -dump Location: http://www.methodize.org/forum/ 2>/dev/null|grep -A 1 'Last post by'|sed /^--/d
        Last post by jason View the latest post
        on Sun Dec 05, 2004 10:13 pm
        Last post by pdkrocul View the latest post
        on Sun Mar 19, 2006 9:30 pm
        Last post by pdkrocul View the latest post
        on Sun Mar 19, 2006 9:39 pm
        Last post by Zed View the latest post
        on Thu Feb 09, 2006 5:47 pm
        Last post by Zed View the latest post
        on Fri Jul 22, 2005 7:34 pm
        Last post by paddy@fpmt.org View the latest post
        on Thu Jul 28, 2005 9:07 pm
Hmmm, looks as abandoned as "noffle" (which I still use). I'll skip it,
as the Beastie Boys said. Wonder if Ted Z. really uses it.

Re: nnrss slow

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:20:41 +0800 jidanni@jidanni.org wrote: 

SB> Hmm... neat: http://www.methodize.org/nntprss/
j> $ apt-cache search rss|grep -i nntp|wc -l
j> 0
j> Hmm, no Debian package, and I must install Java.
j> $ w3m -dump Location: http://www.methodize.org/forum/ 2>/dev/null|grep -A 1 'Last post by'|sed /^--/d
...
j> Hmmm, looks as abandoned as "noffle" (which I still use). I'll skip it,
j> as the Beastie Boys said. 

Up to you.

j> Wonder if Ted Z. really uses it.

Yes, that's why I recommended it.  It parses pretty much every format
out there, doesn't lock up Gnus while it's polling, and I can access it
from anywhere because I set it up on a server.  Whether it's been
updated since Wednesday doesn't matter too much, considering RSS formats
and NNTP are not changing much these days.  Also, I speak Java so if I
have to I can fix what's broken myself.

Ted

Re: nnrss slow

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Sat, 13 Dec 2008 10:44:33 +0100 Steinar Bang <sb@dod.no> wrote: 

>>>>>> Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>:
>> I like nntp/rss better for this since I can just use it as a NNTP
>> server, personally,

SB> Hmm... neat: http://www.methodize.org/nntprss/

>> but I agree asynchronous fetching of RSS feeds would be nice.

SB> Does it poll the RSS stream when you read the corresponding NNTP group?

No, periodically as I have it set up (might be possible to do it
synchronously, I don't remember).

SB> There's a script linked to from the home page that appearently pulls
SB> articles from nntp//rss groups, and feeds them to groups on an INN
SB> server. 

SB> That's a possibility for a larger site, but seems like a bit of overkill
SB> for a personal setup.

It works for me as a central repository of posts, but if I had to start
setting up custom scripts I would probably go straight to the source
or use one of the 10^7 aggregator services out there.

Ted

Re: nnrss slow

[jidanni]

I examined
  WWWOFFLE - World Wide Web Offline Explorer - v2.9d
  Last Time Online Pages
for what it got this morning, and put them into this script I'll try
once a day when I connect to the Internet:

sort -R<<!|xargs -n 1 wwwoffle -o >/dev/null
http://planet.openmoko.org/rss20.xml
http://pinyin.info/news/feed/ ...

(More flexible than putting them on WWWOFFLE's monitor list.)
(nnrss-generate-download-script failed as I mentioned in my other posting.)

Re: switch to another window while gnus is busy, nnmaildir slow startup

[Justus-bulk]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> wrote on Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:20:11
-0600:

> What exactly is slow for you?  Obviously we all have our specific Gnus
> setups, so I think it's useful to find the slow spots that affect all
> users, not just the developers.

While we're at it :-)


Justus-bulk@Piater.name wrote on Sun, 03 Feb 2008 14:29:39 +0100:

> Hi,
>
> This topic seems to come up regularly on this list...:
>
> The nnmaildir backend starts up slowly (about three minutes for me,
> with about 25000 messages), apparently because it reads *all* NOV
> information at startup time.
>
> This approach obviously does not scale well.
>
> My question is: Could this be done on a per-group basis? In this case,
> the NOV parsing could be deferred to the first time one enters a
> group, and nnmaildir initial startup should be almost instantaneous.
>
> Thanks,
> Justus
>
>
> Addendum: Critique + suggestion out of the way, I'd like to add that I
> am nevertheless extremely happy with nnmaildir. I switched to it
> because of its promise of stability and easy way of archiving messages
> by entire groups, and it is paying off big time in both respects. (On
> the other hand, if it scaled better, there would hardly be a need to
> archive messages...)

Re: switch to another window while gnus is busy, nnmaildir slow startup

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:40:33 +0100 Justus-bulk@Piater.name wrote: 
(actually from February 3)
>> The nnmaildir backend starts up slowly (about three minutes for me,
>> with about 25000 messages), apparently because it reads *all* NOV
>> information at startup time.
>> 
>> This approach obviously does not scale well.
>> 
>> My question is: Could this be done on a per-group basis? In this case,
>> the NOV parsing could be deferred to the first time one enters a
>> group, and nnmaildir initial startup should be almost instantaneous.

Yes, but implementing it is not easy because so much of Gnus assumes all
the data is in place.  You could, instead, lower the subscription level
for the nnmaildirs to 5 so they don't get checked on startup, and check
them manually with `M-g'.  I realize it's not a good solution but it's
immediately usable.

Ted