[3297] in SIPB bug reports
GRIPE about XRN 6.17
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan I. Kamens)
Sat Nov 14 21:34:39 1992
Date: Sat, 14 Nov 92 21:34:24 -0500
From: "Jonathan I. Kamens" <jik@pit-manager.MIT.EDU>
To: frisch1@Athena.MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@Athena.MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: frisch1@Athena.MIT.EDU's message of Thu, 12 Nov 92 16:28:54 -0500 <9211122128.AA01211@m11-113-14>
From: frisch1@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 92 16:28:54 -0500
I marked some topics as "Local Kills" hoping that this would speed
things up by eliminating the articles I don't want to read.
However, every time I now load up the newsgroup some of whose
articles I have 'killed', it takes a _tremendously_ long time, even
on a DecStation (45 minutes at least).
I'm not complaning so much about the speed, but now I would like
the option of canceling my 'local kill' request.
First of all, as far as I can tell from looking at the xrn code, it
shouldn't take you much longer to "load up" a newsgroup with a KILL
file than it does to load up a newsgroup without one. In both cases,
only new Subject lines are fetched from the server. Of course, this
may not be true if you have killed a large number of subjects,
although I'm not really sure how many subjects you'd have to kill
before it started slowing things down noticeably. The number of
unread messages being processed would also affect the speed -- the
more messages, the longer it takes to process kills on them.
Second, please try using "betaxrn" instead of "xrn" and see if things
are better.
Third, you will almost certainly notice a performance improvement when
we switch over to the new news server. That should happen before the
end of the month. Ideally, you won't notice the change, other than
news reading suddenly being faster....
Fourth, you CAN cancel kill requests. Just find the file
~/News/group/name/KILL, for example, ~/News/rec/org/sca/KILL, load it
into an editor, and delete the kill lines you don't want there
anymore. Or just delete the KILL file entirely, if you don't want any
of the kills that are in it anymore.
--> Jonathan Kamens
IS/Athena Quality Assurance and User Consulting
Member, Student Information Processing Board (SIPB)
jik@Athena.MIT.EDU
