Startup issues and server availability

Startup issues and server availability

[Alexis Hazell]

Hi all,

i've recently made the move to Gnus from slrn - overall, i've found
it to be much more enjoyable to use. :-) However, i'm finding some
hassles:

* Earlier today, whilst starting up Gnus, an ethernet cable got knocked
loose, and so Gnus quite rightly decided the server was unavailable. i
thought that i could let Gnus know that my news server was again
available by visiting the server buffer and pressing 'O' whilst on
the line listing the news server i use. Nope, didn't work. i tried
quitting Gnus (via 'q' from the Group buffer) and restarting it,
but that made no difference either. The only thing that seems to work
is restarting Emacs entirely.

* i can't work out how to get the same sort of startup performance
from Gnus as i get from slrn. When i start up slrn, there's a pause
of only a few seconds before i get a listing of my subscribed groups
and the new article count for each group. Using Gnus, however, i first
have to wait whilst the entire active list is downloaded - ~2.5M on
the news server i'm using, news.bigpond.com - and then my CPU usage
jumps to 100 percent for a few minutes whilst Gnus finds new news. i've
spent a fair amount of time playing around with what i presume are the
relevant settings in ~/.gnus (which i've confirmed is the config file
Gnus is looking for), without success. Currently that file looks like:

(setq gnus-check-new-newsgroups 'ask-server
      gnus-read-active-file 'some 
      gnus-use-cache t
      gnus-cache-directory "~/.News/cache"
      gnus-cache-active-file "~/.News/cache/active")

But it doesn't matter what values i give to gnus-check-new-newsgroups
(nil or 'ask-server) or gnus-read-active-file (nil, 'some or t) -
i still get the same startup behaviour.

i presume that i'm missing a number of things and /or doing a number
of things wrong . . . . ?

Any help would be much appreciated!


Alexis.

Re: Startup issues and server availability

[nakkaya]

emacs is a single thread application so you will wait while its working.

if its checking mail news rss all at once it will take a long time to
open gnus. what i do is split mail into group 1 news 2 rss 3.

and if you set 

(setq gnus-activate-level 1)

it will only check mail on login. hence fast boot.

than you can do 2 -G or 3 -G to check news or rss.
-- 
Nurullah Akkaya

Re: Startup issues and server availability

[Alexis Hazell]

Hi Nurullah,

Firstly, thanks for your reply. :-)

i don't actually use Gnus for mail or feeds - i use Mutt for the
former and Liferea for the latter, though i'd like to move to Gnus for
feeds once HTTP digest authentication support (a sine qua non for me)
is stable.

However, your post nevertheless put me on the track to the solution
to at least one of the issues i mentioned. In checking out the
gnus-activate-level variable, i noticed it was set by default to
'6', resulting in Gnus doing processing relating to groups i'm not
subscribed to! Setting it to '5' made Gnus behave as i'd expect -
the time to start up and download new headers from subscribed groups
is now /much/ better. :-)

Many thanks!


Alexis.