Re: Gnus is very slow in displaying headers.

[Daniel M. <xt@nm.ru>]

>Yes, the sad fact is that Gnus is that slow and it doesn't matter what
>you do you can't bring it up to the ,,normal speed'' (which means under
>1 second), not even close to it.

Maybe one day X/Emacs would be fitted with Common Lisp backend
having a native-code compiler - then probably the speed would improve
sufficiently for Gnus to be usable with bigger groups: for the time being,
though, it seems that Gnus is not for me :(.

I don't understand, though, why summary buffers have to be generated
afresh every time you enter a group - it seems to me that generating
it once, saving to HD and then adding/removing chunks from it when 
needed (for example, when new headers arrive, some articles are read 
etc.) should speed the things up immensely. Also, it looks to me like
a good idea to have a command line option which will cause regeneration
of summary buffers (if summary buffers are saved to HD). Then, if
user decides to change summary buffer's format line, he can say, for
example: 'xemacs --gnus-regenerate-summary-buffers', then go and
have a (long) lunch, after which he can come back and start reading
his dose of news without waiting for regeneration of summary buffers.


>I tried to do that with Gnus, trimmed down all the features I thought I
>didn't absolutely need etc but of course it was still extremely slow.
>But I sticked with it because it was so much more configurable, I saw at
>the time that with an Emacs based software the limit is my imagination,
>while with Mutt / slrn / etc the limit is the configuration options the
>developers decide to impelement.

Well, you can add whatever options you want by simply modifying 
slrn's source code - some people have done exactly that (see
http://www.xs4all.nl/~thunder7/, for example). Maybe it is easier 
to do in elisp, but if you are well familiar with GNU's development
chain (which I, at least, am not), it shouldn't be a big problem.

>You may know already what happened to me.  While mutt / slrn maximizes
>the time you have for reading by not ,,interrupting you'' with long
>computations, Gnus minimizes the time you will need to read the messages
>by having so much ,,time-saving'' features (adapting scoring is a
>godsend).  And after you experienced both, I can assure you that the
>latter feels better. ;)

Don't think it will work for me - by the time the group is loaded, the
time allocated for my news reading would probably be up :^).


Daniel.