Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

[Xavier Maillard]

Hello,

After months of tries, I still do not « master » gnus agent
features. This is regrettable but that is it. It often interferes
(at least in my mind) with gnus caching mechanism.

So, is there any benefit to use both mechanism, just one but
then, which one ? I know I can have same features with cache than
with agent except agent allows to be « offline ».

If someone has hints on what I should use, I will take it :)

Second is more a problem : my server buffer presents to me a
double entry for my nnimap server which is quite weird. Is there
any solution to delete the culprit entry ? (I already tried 'k'
on the second entry but got an error message.)

Thanks all
-- 
No e-patents, pas de brevets logiciels
Pétition contre les brevets logiciels : http://petition.eurolinux.org

Re: Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

[Sébastien Kirche]

At 18:10 on oct 30 2005, Xavier Maillard said :

[agent vs. cache]

> If someone has hints on what I should use, I will take it :)

Yep : fire the agent ! Unless you need a roaming with a notebook without
connection ?

I used the agent for months, but I stopped because it is soooo slow when
entering a group. And for just marking articles to retrieve later, the
cache is enough for me.

-- 
Sébastien Kirche

Re: Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

[Xavier Maillard]

On 30 oct 2005, Sébastien Kirche wrote:

> At 18:10 on oct 30 2005, Xavier Maillard said :
> 
> [agent vs. cache]
> 
> > If someone has hints on what I should use, I will take it :)
> 
> Yep : fire the agent ! Unless you need a roaming with a
> notebook without connection ?
> 
> I used the agent for months, but I stopped because it is soooo
> slow when entering a group. And for just marking articles to
> retrieve later, the cache is enough for me.

But then how do you check/read/post (new) mails/usenet posts when
you are offline ? I often need to do so. For example, with
planner-mode, I often create task from mails and add an action to
process it. 

I need advice from your personal experience :)
-- 
Xavier Maillard, zedek@gnu-rox.org

Re: Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

[Sébastien Kirche]

At 14:11 on nov 1 2005, Xavier Maillard said :

> > Yep : fire the agent ! Unless you need a roaming with a
                                                    ^
Gosh, I missed the 'usage' word there---------------'

> > notebook without connection ?
> > 
> > I used the agent for months, but I stopped because it is soooo
> > slow when entering a group. And for just marking articles to
> > retrieve later, the cache is enough for me.
> 
> But then how do you check/read/post (new) mails/usenet posts when
> you are offline ? I often need to do so. For example, with
> planner-mode, I often create task from mails and add an action to
> process it. 
> 
> I need advice from your personal experience :)

That's what I wanted too say : the agent is useless to me because I
always use gnus from a connected host. I do not have a laptop (yet) so I
never had to read or write messages while offline. So maybe that you
still need the agent for that purpose.

IIRC for the reading part, the cache should behave like the agent,
should'nt it ?

I plan to get an iBook soon, maybe I will have the same problems as you
by that time ?

-- 
Sébastien Kirche

Re: Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

[Xavier Maillard]

On  1 nov 2005, Sébastien Kirche wrote:

> IIRC for the reading part, the cache should behave like the
> agent, should'nt it ?

Not exactly. Caching is used to « remember » articles you do not
want to see expired/deleted. You can mimic agent with cache by
caching all articles (read, unread, ticked, dormant,...) but you
need for this :

1. either make any article enters the cache (see
   gnus-cache-enter-articles).
2. either « batch » all articles by calling `gnus-jog-cache' such
   as : emacs -batch -l ~/.emacs -l gnus -f gnus-jog-cache"

So to mimic agent you have to tweak this carefully since, by
default, read articles are removed from the cache and, still by
default, only ticked and dormant articles enter the cache.

This is okay for the offline reading part of the problem, but
what about posting messages when offline then ?

A+
-- 
.o.   Xavier Maillard            Tel: +33 6 68 04 64 37
..o  
ooo   

Re: Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

[Flatman]

Hi,

I do have a laptop , but don't use agent (too slow)...
What I do is : I use getmail for downloading mails from pop (in a
cronjob) and procmail for sorting the received mail. Gnus just reads
that mail from local dirs... that may occur offline then.
For reading news I installed leafnode on my laptop. Gnus accesses the
news locally .
Only for sending mail I need to be online , news can be sent offline.

I hope this helps ...

-- 
Erik

* Life is wonderful with Emacs and Perl *

Re: Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

[Xavier Maillard]

On  1 nov 2005, flatman@swing.be wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I do have a laptop , but don't use agent (too slow)... What I
> do is : I use getmail for downloading mails from pop (in a
> cronjob) and procmail for sorting the received mail. Gnus just
> reads that mail from local dirs... that may occur offline then.
> For reading news I installed leafnode on my laptop. Gnus
> accesses the news locally . Only for sending mail I need to be
> online , news can be sent offline.
> 
> I hope this helps ...

That helps but I do not want to depend on third-party tools :) I
used to do that before (in the old days) but I'd rather do all
with emacs and gnus ;)

Thank you.
-- 
"sometimes i feel like we're making emacs better and better because we don't 
 know what to do with emacs once it is finished."

    -- AlexSchroeder on #emacs @OPN

Re: Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

[Glyn Millington]

Xavier Maillard <zedek@gnu-rox.org> writes:

> what about posting messages when offline then ?

I've never got involved with agent!

What I did here when I was on a dial-up connection was to use Leafnode, a
small local news server which downloads messages for selected groups,
stores them and then expires them.  Via ip-up scripts it can be configured
to send out posts when you dial up. Receiving and sending mail can be done
with fetchmail, sendmail and those same ip-up scripts.

But it is entirely possible that I have misunderstood what you are
asking for ....


hth



Glyn

Re: Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

[Xavier Maillard]

On  1 nov 2005, Glyn Millington wrote:

> But it is entirely possible that I have misunderstood what you
> are asking for ....

The problem is more for mails than for news. I rarely have to do
something based on NNTP posts. On the contrary, mails is really
really important and I do not like to defer posting when I do
something. This is why I really need to access my mail every time
(either offline or not) and be able to post answer (still offline
or not).

AFAIK, after lot of RTFMs, I don't really see any good
alternative than to use agent. I have enabled it again since I
can't live without mails. I tweaked it more carefully. I will see
if that's ok after a couple of days.

Huge thank to you and all.
-- 
Xavier MAILLARD (GnuPG: 1024D/1E028EA5)
EmacsOS user (http://emacsfr.org)
APRIL (http://www.april.org)

Re: Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

[Kevin Greiner]

Xavier Maillard <zedek@gnu-rox.org> writes:

> AFAIK, after lot of RTFMs, I don't really see any good
> alternative than to use agent. I have enabled it again since I
> can't live without mails. I tweaked it more carefully. I will see
> if that's ok after a couple of days.

The most likely performance problem is that you've configured the
agent to prefetch articles upon group entry.  If you know that you're
going to read all, or at least most, this can be a good thing to do.
However, the delay can be excessive.

I personally have most groups associated with the default category and
I've configured that category to not prefetch any articles.  In
this configuration, the agent is used to cache only headers so the
performance is usually, to me, quite good.  If I see any interesting
articles, I usually process mark them (the @ key to set the % mark)
and then fetch them (J S) in bulk.  That way I can navigate over a
thread without having to wait to fetch individual articles.  

I also have gnus-select-article-hook bound to
'(gnus-agent-fetch-selected-article) so I don't have to remember to
manually add articles to the agent.  This hook automatically adds new
articles so that I only fetch them once from the server.  That way, I
don't have to pay the overhead of downloading an article multiple
times.

Kevin

Re: Gnus vs Cache : need advice plus a question

[Kevin Greiner]

Kevin Greiner <kevin.greiner@vignette.com> writes:

After reviewing an old thread, I was able to confirm that the
compression algorithm used to cut the size of the .agentview files is
actually resulting in a noticable performance hit.  I've updated
gnus-agent.el in CVS to set the uncompressed format as the default.
After updating to this version, you'll need to open a group once to
update its .agentview file to the uncompressed format.  You should see
better performance on the second time that you open the group.

In my case, we're only talking about .85 seconds for the worst case.
However, this time is proportional to the active size of a group so
your times could be higher.

Kevin