[3193] in SIPB bug reports
GRIPE about XRN 6.17
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Thu Sep 24 13:14:22 1992
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 92 13:13:55 -0400
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, 24 Sep 92 11:35:47 -0400 <9209241535.AA15242@m4-035-12.MIT.EDU>
Xrn is taking you a long time because the news server is very
overloaded.
We are in the process of switching to a faster machine for news
server, at which point the problem should at least partially go away.
Furthermore, the next version of xrn, which is currently in beta test,
features some prefetching features which make it somewhat faster even
when using slow news servers. You can try it by using "betaxrn"
instead of "xrn". However, note that if you do, any X resources in
your .Xresources file will have to use either "XRn2" or "betaxrn" as
the program name rather than "xrn".
The reason rn is not slow when xrn is is that xrn needs to fetch
"Subject", "From" and "Lines" header fields for all new articles in a
newsgroup before it can enter that newsgroup, and rn doesn't do that.
The change in xrn's format has nothing to do with the slowness. The
news server has always "stored old articles"; xrn just recently
started displaying more information about what's on the server.
I hope this answers your questions.
--> Jonathan Kamens
IS/Athena Quality Assurance and User Consulting
Member, Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
jik@Athena.MIT.EDU
