Trivia information about agent operation

Trivia information about agent operation

[Rene Matteau]

I always read the news in disconnected mode as I want to be able to
read the news wherever I am even if there is no network present (with
a portable computer). I also read the old postings where available as
they give an historical view of the product.

I just found the gnus.gnus-bug newsgroup on quimby. I set it up and
ran gnus-agent-batch. I have a cable modem and I am in Canada. Here
are some statistics and observations:

I started the command at 14h50. By 15h12, the .overview file was
written and the counter at the bottom of the Emacs window was still
running strong. I had to leave where it was passed 80 Meg downloaded
and still going. Anyway, the first article in the agent directory was
written at 19h46 and the last one at 20h06. 22889 articles were
downloaded for a total of 95.840 Meg of data. The Emacs is running on
Windows NT. Four hours and 18 minutes of CPU time was used, there were
273144 page faults and the memory used went over 188 Meg.

It seems that gnus first download the headers and build the .overview
file and then download all the articles and keep them in memory until
all have been retrieved. Then it write them to disk. This may be a
problem if the machine crash in the middle as you start from the
beginning again...

Now it's time to start reading :-)
-- 
Rene

Re: Trivia information about agent operation

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Rene Matteau <matteau@ca.ibm.com> writes:

> It seems that gnus first download the headers and build the .overview
> file and then download all the articles and keep them in memory until
> all have been retrieved. Then it write them to disk. This may be a
> problem if the machine crash in the middle as you start from the
> beginning again...

Yup.  I've now put this on the todo list.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen