[2496] in SIPB bug reports
GRIPE about XRN 6.17
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Thu Feb 20 17:03:03 1992
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 92 17:02:24 -0500
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: gonzalez@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: gonzalez@Athena.MIT.EDU's message of Thu, 20 Feb 92 12:29:00 -0500 <9202201729.AA24308@m2-225-5.MIT.EDU>
Your bug report is very vague, and I'm not certain at all what do to
with it.
First of all, I just tried entering a newsgroup with 60 unread
articles in it from the newsgroup menu, and it took only 15 seconds
for xrn to switch into article viewing mode. I do not know why "to
read a group with 36 articles in it took about two or three minutes;"
I have not experienced bad performance like that since we updated the
disk space and memory in our news server a couple of weeks ago. When
is the last time you experienced service that was that slow? At what
time of day? On which workstation (exactly)?
Second, xrn never "used to automatically purge... unread articles if
there were more than three hundred or so." There used to be fewer
unread articles because (a) we used to expire old articles more
quickly than we do now, and (b) the amount of traffic on the USENET
has increased significantly (the current trend is that the amount of
traffic doubles every year).
Third, I am not certain what you mean when you say that xrn "stores
the old read articles until I have thousands." Xrn doesn't "store"
anything. Articles are stored on the news server, and xrn has no
control at all over which articles remain stored there and which ones
get expired by the software running on the server. The two numbers
displayed by xrn in the newsgroup selection level are the number of
unread articles in each newsgroup and the number of read articles in
the newsgroup that are still available on the news server. However,
the existence of those read articles should not in any way affect the
speed with which xrn accesses news.
Your suggestion that xrn should allow the user to configure the
maximum number of articles that will remain "unread" in a newsgroup
seems like a good one, and I will pass it on to the maintainer of xrn.
--> Jonathan Kamens
IS/Athena Quality Assurance and User Consulting
Treasurer, Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
jik@Athena.MIT.EDU
