Re: Not running expiry when I exit a group

[Justin Sheehy <dworkin@ccs.neu.edu>]

Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@charly.cs.uni-dortmund.de> writes:

>   David> If you use total-expire, Gnus loops over every article in the
>   David> "active range" checking the dates on the files to see if they
>   David> should be expired.  If you have an old ticked or cached
>   David> article the active range can be huge.
> 
> Does Gnus behave differently with auto-expire?  How is the behavior
> different?

[disclaimer: I haven't actually checked the code.  this is an assumption]

I think that the only reason that total-expire needs to loop that way
is because the articles are not already marked as expirable.  The loop
is simply to determine which articles are expirable.

Since auto-expire explicitly marks read articles as expirable, it
would not need this behavior.  It can just go ahead to the work of
actually expiring articles.

> Does one need to mark articles as "read" rather than "dormant" or
> "ticked" in order to benefit from the improvements from changing from
> total-expire to auto-expire?

I'm not really sure what you mean here.

'dormant' and 'ticked' are two different ways to say 'unread'.

Dormant or ticked (or other unread) articles are not expired at all
with either total-expire or auto-expire.

The only way that these articles have anything to do with this problem
is that they may keep the active range very large, thus making the
loop in total-expire take a very long time.

-Justin