Re: Benchmarking Gnus

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

On Fri, 1 Feb 2002, Steinar Bang wrote:

> > Hm. There is two kinds of expiry in a agent group, one is the normal
> > expiring in the real backend via E marks (nnimap), which should work
> > (does it?),
> 
> If you mean: "does it work if you run expiry when plugged?", the
> answer is yes.

Good.

> If you mean: "if you run expiry when unplugged, are the results
> transferred to the nnimap group, when you go plugged?", the answer was
> no, the last time I tried.

Bad.  I wonder why?  Hm.  Ah, nnagent-request-expire-articles needs to
save the invokation into a file that is evaluated when you plug in.  Much
like the "flags" file.  Maybe it can even use that file.  This looks like
a five-liner.

> > but you should also be able to locally expire the agent cache with
> > gnus-agent-expire-articles (does it work?).
> 
> I haven't tried recently, and I'm not in physical reach of my laptop
> right now, but it worked the last time I tried.  Ie. it _did_ expire
> articles older than 7 days, but if I had some old ticked articles,
> the articles in between were re-fetched the next time I fetched
> articles into the agent.
> 
> According to Bjørn Mork earlier in this thread, this should be fixed
> now...? 

Fixed in what sense?  I think the agent MUST have ticked (and generally 
marked articles) locally stored, otherwise the marks will be removed by 
code in gnus-sum.el that removes flags on articles that has disappeared. 
Hm. Maybe that code could be changed, instead of requiring the agent to 
download all marked articles though.

> > The first should delete articles on the server, the second should
> > not.
> 
> > Hm.  I don't use the agent much,
> 
> This means that you don't use a laptop with suspend/resume? :-)

My laptop always has a network connection. :-)

And I never expire anything anyway.  Maybe that can be useful for the
benchmark/design discussion, I have some IMAP groups with >500000 messages
or so.  (Which are completely unusable in Gnus).

> > (Btw, wouldn't it be nice if it was possible to enable the agent via
> > customize instead of forcing people to manually edit ~/.gnus?)
> 
> You can toggle server agent status interactively in the server buffer,
> if that's what you're thinking about...?

No, I was thinking about that you need to call (gnus-agentize) in ~/.gnus 
to enable that code (and other code as well).  I'd like a 
`gnus-use-agent' variable, much like the `gnus-use-cache' variable.