Re: Gnus fetches too many headers WAS: Re: Showing Complete Active Threads

[Tassilo Horn <heimdall@uni-koblenz.de>]

Dale Worley <worley@dragon.ariadne.com> writes:

Hi Dale,

> I've had some problems like this myself.  I think the problem is that
> your .newsrc doesn't record all the numbers from 1 to 61172 as being
> already seen, and so Gnus attempts to fetch every header in the range
> with a separate HEAD command.

My .newsrs has this entry:

,----
| infko.general: 1-63217
`----

Looks ok, doesn't it?

> It is possible that the news server is not reporting the "minimum
> article number present" correctly, and so Gnus is attempting to fetch
> articles starting with number 1. I would log in to the NNTP server
> using telnet and do a "GROUP infko.general" and see what the results
> are.

As I am no NNTP expert, how do I login and authenticate? The group is
only readable by students and employees of the university. Providing -l
<myuser> to telnet doesn't work.

> You may want to manually edit .newsrc to say "infko.general: 1-60000"
> or something like that.  At the least, if you tell Gnus to only fetch
> 100 articles from the group (when it asks), it should run correctly.

Normally it doesn't ask, because the group only has a handful new
articles. I suspect

,----
| gnus-fetch-old-headers is a variable defined in `gnus-sum.el'.
| Its value is some
`----

to cause the heavy loading of already seen articles, but I may be wrong.

Luckily this really happens only in some very rare cases and my internet
connection is fast enough to fetch some megs then.

Bye,
Tassilo
-- 
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.