Re: Slow reading new news: explanation

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Martin Christensen <knightsofspamalot-factotum@gvdnet.dk> writes:

>>>>>> "Jesper" == Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:
>>> Simply by hitting a wrong key in the group buffer did I
>>> accidentally put the nntp backend under Agent management --
>>> something that I thought Gnus had automatically done for me, since
>>> I'd recently upgraded from CVS, and I'd never knowingly touched any
>>> Agent settings.
> Jesper> The behaviour changed recently to turn the agent on by default
> Jesper> -- so you don't necessarily have to hit the wrong key to
> Jesper> enable the agent unknowingly.  From 'GNUS-NEWS':
>
> The slowdown started not immediately after upgrading Gnus, but only
> some time after when I specifically recall hitting a wrong key or two
> (I was typing in a different frame than I thought I were). But of
> course, enabling the agent by default along with the following gold
> nugget from the changelog,
>
> 2002-08-26  Simon Josefsson  <jas@extundo.com>
>
> 	* gnus-agent.el (gnus-agent-auto-agentize-methods): New variable.
> 	(gnus-agentize): Auto agentize all nntp and nnimap groups.
> 	(gnus-agent-possibly-save-gcc): Autoload.
> 	Suggested by (KOSEKI Yoshinori) <kose@meadowy.org>.
>
> isn't exactly helpful when you don't expect that kind of behaviour.
> What is the reasoning behind agentising by default? Without knowing
> anything for sure I would assume that the people using Gnus, and in
> particular the development version, would be the kind of users with
> the least need for such a feature, though of course it's attractive
> to some users.
>
> I think that a word of warning about slowdowns should be added to the
> documentation.

The point of the change was to speed up Gnus.  A slowdown is not to be
expected.  I think you see a bug, could you make a bug report?
Ideally including the profiling and protocol traces you mentioned in
your earlier message.