Re: [Pan-users] Pan cannot handle large numbers of headers?

[jef_e]

Phillip Pi wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Is it me or does Pan v0.14.2.91 fail to handle large numbers of headers from a newsgroup? 

It's not you. It's been discussed a lot in the past, and they way pan 
deals with things just isn't scalable to the level that many premium 
news providers now go with retention.

> I 
> tried to download about 3,044,000 headers from alt.binaries.hdtv newsgroup. My computer choked 
> at about 1,900,000 headers when I came back from a 30 minutes break.

I recently upgraded to 2GB of RAM, and find that I can handle just a bit 
over 2.2 million before things get wacky. (When I only had 512MB, it was 
maybe 500,000)


 HDD light was spinning, m
> KDE v3.3.4 was frozen and not responsive. I had to kill Pan via SSH. Of course that was slow as 
> heck too. I eventually to kill X server because stuff was broken.

Just killing pan should be enough, it just takes a while for things to 
settle down.


> I am using an Athlon XP 2200+ with 1 GB of RAM. Isn't that enough or is Pan not optimized for 
> this big number of headers?

Last I heard, the Pan team is working a new database backend that will 
clear up this problem. Take a look at the files in ~/.pan/<your news 
server> to see why things get so bogged down. Right now, my file for 
alt.binaries.multimedia is a tad over 1 GB in size :)

You best bet is to load headers in small groups, deleting the old and 
unwanted stuff.