Re: [Pan-users] article cache size

[Duncan]

bubba posted on Tue, 30 Sep 2014 14:20:51 -0400 as excerpted:

> i need a large article cache size, like 200gb.  i can't seem to get more
> than 16384 allocated in the pan settings.  i altered the preferences.xml
> file:
>   <int name='cache-size-megs' value='200000'/>
> 
> but it has no effect on the maximum allowed 'size of article cache (in
> mib)' in pan -> edit -> edit preferences.  i have a  terabyte free on
> that hard drive.
> 
> is the max size hard-coded or am i missing something blindingly obvious?

As Travis says, please don't post in HTML (your post came thru as both).  
I guess you know what a mess HTML looks like in pan, which is what a 
number of regulars (including me) read this list with (as the 
gmane.comp.gnome.apps.pan.user group on news.gmane.org, read about it at 
http://gmane.org ).  And for clients that do handle HTML, it can carry 
malware (at a minimum, web-bug spyware), etc, too, so it's just not a 
good choice to post in, or to let your mail or news client parse, 
unrestricted (with that feeling strong enough in pan regulars that 
changing that for pan itself isn't likely, tho you can set the HTML 
previewer application setting).

As to your question, years ago I was the person who asked to bump the max 
cache size from 1 GiB -- I needed 4 GiB at the time and it was bumped to 
20, which was great.

Later it was bumped again and I had /thought/ that the last time it was 
made effectively unlimited.  However, that may be incorrect, or it may 
now be running up against the maximum size limit of the type of integer 
used.

FWIW, I'm running 12 gig on a dedicated cache partition, here.

Is your pan 32-bit, or 64-bit?  I don't claim to be a coder myself, but 
chances are I can make at least some sense of the code and see how it 
works, possibly coming up with a patch for you... unless it /is/ running 
into a maxint condition and changing that is more complex than a simple 
type change.

The alternative would be modifying your download style a bit.  Pan's 
assumptions about how people do downloading are obviously different than 
yours and mine, and a huge cache isn't needed for its way.  But some of 
use obviously use pan differently, and while it generally works, it's not 
quite the easy fit it would be if those assumptions were different.  More 
about that later when I have more time and/or have taken a look.

One other possibility.  It's possible (at least on Linux, don't know 
about MS Windows or Apple OSX) to run multiple different pan instances at 
once.  If you are active in enough groups and they split by subject well 
enough, you could do that.  There's a variable that can be set to point 
pan at a directory other than its default, and you can set this 
differently to have multiple different pan setups.  I do that here.  If 
multiple pan setups each with a 16 gig cache would work...

But let me investigate that patch, first...

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman