Re: [Pan-users] Re: 'Never Expire Old Articles'

[Karl Stevens]

Duncan wrote:
> Yes/yes/yes.
> I have my text group pan instance set to never expire as well.  As the 
> number of posts grows, pan will get slower at opening, particularly in a 
> cold-cache situation, when it has to read everything from disk.  I have 
> plenty of memory (8 gigs), so I just load pan with KDE and keep that 
> instance of pan open.  When I hibernate/suspend-to-disk (using the 
> mainline kernel functionality), pan suspends with the rest of the 
> system.  That does dump cache, so when the system loads again at resume, 
> if I quit pan it takes awhile to load again, but since it stays running, 
> it stores everything it has loaded ans sorted in pan's memory, so it 
> doesn't have to sort it again as long as I don't quit and restart pan.  
> That works fine, and pan's always loaded when I want to use it.
>
> I think I've been running it that way about a year, so I have about a 
> year's worth of text posts around, for the groups I follow, anyway.  On 
> disk, it appears I'm using 141 megabytes total, 128 megs of that in the 
> article cache, 8 megs in the groups list.
>
> Obviously, the biggest storage expense is in the cached messages.  You 
> can delete those manually, no problem.  However, pan keeps the overviews 
> and threading info separately, and just deleting the cached articles 
> won't delete that.  In theory, you could clean up the threading as well, 
> as the files for that are editable plain text too, but it'd be a bit of a 
> hassle.  I've not tried it, so can't say for sure whether it's the 
> threading or the cache loading that takes the extra time.  I think it's 
> the threading, however, so just deleting the cache won't get all your pan 
> loading speed back, tho it might get some of it back.  Of course, you can 
> simply clear out the threading and overview indexing files as well, then 
> redownload what's still on the server if desired, if you want all your 
> loading speed back.
>
> There is another alternative, however.  Note that while the expiration 
> choices in the dropdown boxes are rather arbitrary, pan actually stores 
> the expiration time in days, in the server file.  If you edit it directly 
> there, you can set any number of days you want, 365 if you want a year, 
> longer if you want, or a single day, or anything in between.  So if you 
> simply don't like the choices in the GUI, edit the config directly and 
> set it to what you want there.  I might eventually do that, setting it to 
> say 270 days (~9 months).  However, the pan load times aren't /that/ bad 
> yet, as long as I set pan to load and stay loaded, so no urgency so far.
>
>   
I haven't noticed any slowing down on opening. I have 2 months worth of 
articles and use gnome (don't ask me why)
The reason I use the 'never expire articles' is that the text-only 
discussion groups I follow get very confused looking when
the articles do expire. All the replies are there but not the original 
posts. At first I thought it was my conservative government
censoring newsnet until I realised what those settings do. In Australia 
newsnet is seen as something the ISP's have to live with.
Newsnet servers just disappear for weeks on end and you do need to use 
fallback servers. Thanks for the information and it
Pan is a mature and excellent application.