[2696] in SIPB bug reports
[daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU : just how big is xrn]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Calvin Clark)
Thu Apr 9 08:20:26 1992
Date: Thu, 9 Apr 92 08:19:58 -0400
From: Calvin Clark <ckclark@mit.edu>
To: bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: sophia@Athena.MIT.EDU, jik@Athena.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: ckclark@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: [2632] in bug-sipb
I ran into a user who for some reason had an incredibly large number of
newsgroups subscribed to in her .newsrc, and this will almost always
cause xrn to run out of memory. (Actually, on a DECstation, it will
live. However, when I tried replacing all the !'s with :'s in my
.newsrc, xrn was taking up over 23 meg of memory when it mapped.) Jik
has given his explanation of why this happens, and I agree that there's
not much you can do about it without a lot of work.
Now, I think that the most likely cause of a Spartan .newsrc is that
when you run rn or gnus for the first time, it subscribes you to
*everything*. That's right, by default you get *all* of the 1500+
newsgroups we have here. I'm not going to speculate on the type of
person who reads all of the newsgroups, especially considering that I
know someone who reads all the discuss meetings. However, while rn and
gnus can handle a large number of subscriptions, xrn can't. I can
imagine a someone trying out rn for day, and then deciding to switch to
xrn, without bothering to figure out how to use rn (or a text editor :-)
to bring the number of subscribed groups down to something reasonable.
Xrn will barf all over anyone who tries to do that.
Personally, I think it's stupid for users to automagically be subscribed
to *all* of the groups the first time they use a newsreader. Is there
anyone on this list who disagrees? I mean, for rn, it's no big deal.
For gnus, if you don't have a .newsrc file already, you could wait a
good half on hour for gnus to subscribe you to all of the groups. (I
can't believe that anyone does this; that is, waits for it to finish. I
tried it out today just to see what would happen.) The list of all
available newsgroups is in human-readable format. One does not need it
forced down one's throat.
Admittedly, this is not the cause of all of the memory problems people
encounter while using xrn. Some user education might help, but most
people start reading news by simply trying out the programs. Xrn
doesn't subscribe you to everything right out. (It can't. It would die
in a most heinous fashion if it tried.) Why should the other readers do
so, if there is not much to be gained by it, especially if they can
cause Xrn to die by taking that approach? I'd be willing to do a little
hacking to see if it's reasonable to try to change rn and gnus so that
they behave well, but I want to give you all a chance to flame at me
first for suggesting it. :-)
-Calvin
