Re: Gnus crawls when reading the active file for nntp

[Michael Slass]

Tim Lavoie <tool_man@spamcop.net> writes:

>>>>>> "Charles" == Charles Phlip Chan <cpchan@sympatico.ca> writes:
>
>    Charles> On 7 Sep 2004, kitty@dre.vanderbilt.edu wrote:
>    >> For example, I read about 2 or 3 newsgroups, but I have about
>    >> 50 or so mail groups. So I am more or less using Gnus as a
>    >> mailreader. So I really don't need Gnus to check for news
>    >> everytime I want to check for new mail, which is quite often.
>
>    Charles> (1) Seperate your mail and your news into 2 topics, (2)
>    Charles> Put the cursor on the mail topic and hit M-g to get the
>    Charles> mail. Alternatively, you can setup something like
>    Charles> leafnode to fetch your news periodically.
>
>I'm not the original poster, but I've noticed the same delays myself
>lately. The odd bit is that it isn't really fetching much when it does
>check the newsgroups. I too have the gnus-read-active-file set to
>'some, and there is really only a handful of packets exchanged. The
>rest of the time is Gnus thrashing my CPU.
>
>I did just set up leafnode, and everything is quick again, but it
>shouldn't matter if the old traffic meant much. My .newsrc file is
>reset as well, so could it be related to the amount of information
>there?
>
>        Cheers,
>        Tim

I had the same symptoms, and I was able to fix it by clearing out my
one of my "active" files, I think this one:

/home/mikesl/News/agent/nntp/news.comcast.giganews.com/agent.lib/active

It was full of groups I never look at, and gnus was spending a ton of
time trying to do some sort of computationally-expensive regex
operation on the contents of the file.  I purged the file while
maintaining the list structures within it --- basically turning the
list of crap I never look at into an empty list.

I'm sorry I can't remember more exactly which of the active files it
was, but if you search your home directory for active files, look for
the huge one.

I thought I had caused this problem myself with errant keystrokes, but
if other folks are experiencing it, it may be a gnus bug.

I'm using gnus v5.10.6

-- 
Mike Slass