Re: db-backed mail back end

[Jan Vroonhof <jvlists@ntlworld.com>]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Anyway, I've been elping some more.  I find that it's typical for me
> to read large groups quite often.  That is, I enter groups that have a
> very small number of new articles, and a huge number of older
> articles.

A good example for me is nntp+news.gnus.org:gnus.ding, which has takes
(or I should say took, see below) ages to visit for me. Most of that
seems to be grabbing the NOV entries over the network.

> I. e., a big NOV file.  rec.arts.sf.fandom has a 16MB NOV
> file, and putting that file into a buffer takes (on this machine) half
> a second.  So I've implemented a function `nnheader-insert-nov-file'
> that first inserts the last 8K into a buffer, and if the first NOV
> line we're looking for wasn't in that chunk, we just fall back to the
> old way of inserting the whole file into the buffer.

Does this also work over the network?

We recently downgraded to exchange for our news server and it
generates broken NOV lines, of the type "larsi@gnus.org (Lars I)
<larsi@gnus.org>". So I set nntp-nov-is-evil to 't' [1] and
low-and-behold it seems faster! (that maybe because gnus-fetch-old-headers
seems to have stopped working as well).

Jan

Footnotes: [1] I tried doing this in the server parameters but failed,
so I set it globally.