Slow and big Gnus 5.8.x

Slow and big Gnus 5.8.x

[Anders Melchiorsen]

Since I converted from Gnus 5.6 to 5.8 (skipping the development
releases), I have been annoyed by Gnus being slower and using more
memory than before.

Especially when I enter a group, Gnus is slower in generating the
summary and it is virtually impossible for me to enter groups with,
say, 2000 articles (since Emacs grows to an image size that my 64MB of
RAM simply cannot handle).

Is there some settings I should tweak when switching Gnus version?

Or is this just the way development goes, and my machine is now too
small to run a recent Gnus?

-- 
Regards, Anders
(address is valid)

Re: Slow and big Gnus 5.8.x

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Anders Melchiorsen <postmaster@and.nospam.kampsax.k-net.dk> writes:
> Especially when I enter a group, Gnus is slower in generating the
> summary and it is virtually impossible for me to enter groups with,
> say, 2000 articles (since Emacs grows to an image size that my 64MB of
> RAM simply cannot handle).

I don't know why you'd have that much trouble.  My normal Gnus
environment is on a 4-yr-old PPro 200MHz, and I routinely enter groups
with at least several hundred articles.  Yes, it takes a moment, but
it's not unreasonable.  It is certainly the case that 5.8 is more
featureful, and is therefore trying to do more for you, than 5.6 did,
but I can't say there are reasons for group entry, particularly, to
have slowed down -- the big changes for 5.8 were MIME handling, mail
sources, and some funky access methods (nnweb, nnultimate,
nnslashdot), not *Summary* generation.

On the other hand, I notice you're using a recent XEmacs 21.  Is it
perhaps compiled with debugging enabled?  You will see some fairly
drastic speed improvement if you ./configure --error-checking=none
--debug=no.

Re: Slow and big Gnus 5.8.x

[Kai Großjohann]

Anders Melchiorsen <postmaster@and.nospam.kampsax.k-net.dk> writes:

> Especially when I enter a group, Gnus is slower in generating the
> summary and it is virtually impossible for me to enter groups with,
> say, 2000 articles (since Emacs grows to an image size that my 64MB of
> RAM simply cannot handle).

Do some Japanese or Chinese people post to the groups you are reading?
Gnus would then try to show you the CJKV characters where font loading
might take a while.  But then, maybe your XEmacs is non-mule.

kai
-- 
~/.signature: No such file or directory

Solved: Re: Slow and big Gnus 5.8.x

[Anders Melchiorsen]

Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com> wrote:

> Anders Melchiorsen <postmaster@and.nospam.kampsax.k-net.dk> writes:
> > Especially when I enter a group, Gnus is slower in generating the
> > summary and it is virtually impossible for me to enter groups with,
> > say, 2000 articles (since Emacs grows to an image size that my 64MB of
> > RAM simply cannot handle).
> 
> I don't know why you'd have that much trouble.  My normal Gnus

Shame on me.

While I did produce some depressing timings to back up my case, I also
found out that I was in fact using an uncompiled Gnus. Compiling it
did improve both memory usage and speed considerably. I guess I should
have done that two months ago...

So, the lesson learned was that one thing to remember when installing
a new Gnus is to correct your paths :-/.

Thanks for your help nevertheless.

> On the other hand, I notice you're using a recent XEmacs 21.  Is it
> perhaps compiled with debugging enabled?  You will see some fairly
> drastic speed improvement if you ./configure --error-checking=none
> --debug=no.

I am using the RPM from www.xemacs.org - I suppose they are properly
built?

-- 
Regards, Anders
(address is valid)

Re: Solved: Re: Slow and big Gnus 5.8.x

[Anders Melchiorsen]

Following up on my own message:

> Shame on me.
> 
> While I did produce some depressing timings to back up my case, I also
> found out that I was in fact using an uncompiled Gnus. Compiling it

An interesting point is that compiling Gnus made my draft group
working again. I was unable to enter the group during the time that I
accidentally left Gnus uncompiled.

I remember someone else also having a problem with entering the draft
group in 5.8.3 - perhaps compiling Gnus would also help that person.


Regards, Anders
(address is valid)