Improving Gnus speed

[Francis Moreau <francis.moro@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I'd like to give some feedbacks about Gnus' speed.

First I just wrote this in order to improve Gnus _only_.

I use as a newsreader Gnus and Thunderbird, and I must admit that Gnus
is much slower specially to fetch header and to display the summary
buffer.

One example: I'm using article caching to save precious articles. Here's
my related config:

   (setq gnus-use-cache 'passive)
   (setq gnus-cacheable-groups "^nntp")
   (setq gnus-keep-backlog 50)

Even if articles are cached, Gnus takes some times to display the
summary buffer:

Entering in the group containing cached articles: 4 secs.

This group contains 230 unread articles.

Now display all articles in this group by doing '/ o':

Gnus asks me:

     How many articles from nnml+cache:nntp+news.free.fr:comp.lang.c (default 42555):

Type <RET>.

     Fetching headers for nnml+cache:nntp+news.free.fr:comp.lang.c...
     < 7 secs>
     done
     < 22 secs>
     Generating summary...
     < 3 secs>
     done

As you can see all these figures are pretty high, the biggest being 22
secs. I'm wondering what's Gnus is executing since it seems between 2
steps.

Corresponding group parameters:

     (display . all)
     (gnus-use-scoring t)
     (gnus-thread-sort-functions '((not gnus-thread-sort-by-number)
                                   gnus-thread-sort-by-total-score)))))

I'm interested in improving this, so any suggestions are welcome.

Otherwise I can have a look to the revelant part of the Gnus' code,
although I almost don't speak elisp but that would be a reason to start
learning this language, if some one can suggest me some functions or
some starting points to look at.

BTW, Gnus is using Git as SCM (cool) but it seems that it uses HTTP
method only (not git protocol). Is that right ?

IIRC, git protocol is more effective, and I actually don't compile Git
with HTTP support since it adds some dependency like curl for no good
reason.

Out off topic: Why does Gnus development use a mailing list ? That's
pretty paradoxical, isn't it ?

Thanks
-- 
Francis