Re: [Pan-users] The Sorting, it's so Slow!!!

[Duncan]

On Mon 03 Feb 2003 10:51, Kelly, Mark posted as excerpted below:
> My only problem is that it just seems unbearable slow at sorting large
> groups of new messages.  I have a Dual P3 933 mobo with 512 megs of DDR,
> and it just doesn't seem to me that it should be this slow when sorting.
>
> Sometimes I go for a few days without getting posts and there might be over
> a 100,000 new posts (well, today it had been over a week and there where
> 200,000 new posts).  And's it's been 20 mins and it's still sorting?  Are
> there any speed tweaks for this?  

I mentioned this some weeks ago as well, I think.  I came across it when I 
attempted to help stress-test one of the Cox servers to help track down an 
unexpectedly limited capacity issue.  Shortly before the appointed 
stress-test time, I loaded the (in)famous chello.binaries group, and spent 
basically the entire stress test waiting for it to load, so I could select a 
hundred K overviews or so and d/l them, then select 100K more and wait for 
the display to update, so I could set them to d/ling.  (That was, of course, 
b4 the latest gnet enhanced beta where a single task can utilize four 
threads.)  I never DID get more than a couple threads d/ling at once, and 
decided PAN is simply unworkable when attempting to handle multiple hundred K 
overviews at once.  Fortunately, I don't deal with that active a group on an 
ordinary basis, so it doesn't interfere with my normal news activity.

I strongly suspect it may be a performance issue with the GTK widgets PAN 
uses.  That's caused issues before, as the GTK 2 widgets simply aren't yet 
all that optimized for that sort of numbers of lines.  By the time of PAN 
0.11.x, the last GTK 1 PAN, those widgets were pretty optimized, but GTK 2 
still has issues.  What that has meant is that for the overview/header pane, 
they use a less featureful widget that they intend to eventually migrate away 
from, when the full featured one has enough performance to work.  However, it 
seems even the low-feature version they have now can't cope with 
multiple-hundred K lines.

-- 
Duncan
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin