Re: 3rd posting: please help -- gnus almost unusable

[Tim McNamara]

Michael Slass <miknrene@drizzle.com> writes:

> My gnus is almost unusable: each time I try to fetch new news and
> mail (G in group buffer), gnus spends *forever* doing:
>   gnus-active-to-gnus-format((nntp "news.comcast.giganews.com")
>   <long list of groups here>

"news.comcast.giganews.com" is correct?  You're sure?  AFAIK Comcast
and GigaNews are different, but perhaps Comcast contracts with
GigaNews for its news server?  That just struck me as odd, although
it's conceivable that it's correct.

> The long list of groups contains almost entirely groups I don't ever
> read.  How can I purge the list, or what can I do to make this
> faster?

Sounds like it's downloading the full group list from the news server
each time.  This is time consuming and is not done after the first
time with a new news server, if Gnus is operating correctly or you
force it to rebuild the group list.  I suspect there's a problem with
your .newsrc and .newsrc.eld files.

Check and see if you've got a .newsrc and .newsrc.eld file, and that
the latter has been updated each time you use Gnus.  You are
describing non-default behavior that suggests to me that Gnus hasn't
been properly terminated (e.g., you're quitting Emacs without first
quitting Gnus, and thus Gnus is not updating and writing your .newsrc
and .newsrc.eld files).

> I've already added: (setq gnus-read-active-file 'nil) to my .gnus in
> attempt to fix this, to no avail

It's possible that (setq gnus-read-active-file 'nil) creates problems
rather than solving them.  Also, I think the correct syntax would be:

     (setq gnus-read-active-file nil)

rather than

     (setq gnus-read-active-file 'nil)

Hope this helps!