Re: speed of Gnus

[Alexander Syrov <asyrov@mail.ru>]

Hello, Peter.

On Mon, 11 Apr 2005 10:44:56 +0200
Peter Petersen wrote:

2 years or so ago I too switched from Forte Agent to Gnus. At first I had
the same problems as you describe. After a while I realized that using a
newsreader the "Gnus way" is also quite comfortable. You can't make Gnus
generate summary for thousands of articles quickly enough, but possibly you
may live without seeing all those articles at once.

 PP> Well I always do it this way; it doesn't mean that I read all those 
 PP> articles (oh NO!), but I can search through them for keywords like "via 
 PP> ac97", "crypto file system" or whatever.

Searching for articles is much more effective with some indexing
software. I use namazu and gnus-namazu.el. Another alternative is
nnir.el. It takes a few seconds to process a query and build a virtual
group containing the matching articles.

 PP> easily switch between 
 PP> offline and online mode

J j (gnus-agent-toggle-plugged) works in summary and group buffers.

 PP> (or use them simultaneously: downloading headers 
 PP> in _one_ group, downloading bodies in other groups - while at the same 
 PP> time selectively opening articles in some groups via visual inspection 
 PP> and just because I am curious...),

Lack of asyncronous operation is an evident drawback of
Gnus. Unfortunately, this functionality can't be easily implemented in Emacs.

 PP> I can easily watch threads and "lock" 
 PP> articles which thusly are protected against deleting or "compacting" the 
 PP> database (or expiring).

You can do it with Gnus. When would you like to mark an article? If you read
it the first time or if you come back to it while searching. In the former
case, Gnus shows you all the recently fetched articles in default setup
(and the old articles in the same threads if you set gnus-fetch-old-headers
to t). In the latter case you may search for articles with indexing
software. It is much more productive than manually watching over thousands
of message headers.

 PP> - Do slrn or tin offer a way to save interesting articles in such a way 
 PP> that they are visible _inside_ the corresponding group? (like Gnus does 
 PP> with its caching or Forte Agent with its "lock symbol"). I don't think 
 PP> so.

You probably need a local newsserver. Gnus Agent eliminates the need for
it, but it is neccessary with other newsreaders if you want to create an
offline storage for articles. You may try e.g. leafnode.

 PP> On the other hand scoring (and all the complex possibilities with Gnus) 
 PP> is totally unimportant to me.

I recommend you to try using scoring. It helps to deal with lots of mail &
news much more quickly.

 PP> - Can slrn (or tin) save articles in the group?
 PP>  If so: I will switch from Gnus to slrn, most likely ;-)

If you definitely can't change you habits, it seems to be the best
solution. You may use slrn + local leafnode server. But I recommend to try
following the "Gnus way" of reading news for a week or two before taking
this decision. Maybe you'll like it better.

 PP> - How to speed up Gnus (if at all possible)?

Not to the extent you want.

 PP> - How do you get along with Gnus and with huge groups?

My news archive (Gnus Agent cache) is over 1 Gb large and contains over
230,000 messages. But I rarely have more than 300-500 articles in summary
buffer at once. Scoring helps me to sort out new articles I don't want to
read and gnus-namazu allows to search for old articles quickly and
effectively. 

-- 
Regards,
Alexander Syrov.