How many days will it need to read a huge active file?

[Marc Aurel <4-tea-2@a42.de>]

Hi,

I seem to have a problem with an exceptionally slow machine and a huge
newsfeed. I'm trying to get rid of my local newsserver (as I'm now the
only person to read news on this system), so I set up pgnus with the
Agent to get news from my provider's newsserver.

At the moment I'm always starting pgnus as 'gnus-unplugged', followed by
'J j' (to plug in) and '2 g' (to retrieve my mail, which I read with
pgnus exclusively).

Whenever I start pgnus plugged, it connects to my provider's newsserver
and all I see for the next couple of hours is a NNTP counter slowly
increasing to 10+ MB. Then XEmacs sits there, eating about half of the
available virtual memory (easily in excess of 60MB) and almost idling at 
less than 10% of the processor load. I have already tried waiting more
than a day (I imagined that it was a one-time-only process). In this
state, XEmacs doesn't refresh its display, nor does it handle a C-g
within a couple of minutes (I'm always impatient, so I 'kill -9' it).

At work, I use almost the same setup with the same version of pgnus on a 
machine with lots more horsepower and network connectivity and it works
just fine. Any idea how to find out what exactly pgnus is doing while
it's not doing anything for me?

My home machine is a K6-200 with 64MB (+128MB swap) connected to the net
by ISDN running Red Hat Linux 5.2, the work machine is some PII-450 with
128MB on a LAN. Any hints?

-- 
Marc
<URL:http://www.saar.de/bong/faq.html>

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