[16214] in Athena Bugs
Re: sun4 8.2.9: netscape
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Todd Belton)
Mon Aug 24 08:57:10 1998
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 1998 08:57:07 -0400
From: Todd Belton <tbelton@MIT.EDU>
To: Jordi Sod <jorongo@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
Jordi Sod wrote:
> When one tries to download the headers for a newsgroup, the program
> crashes very often, giving a "Bus Error" message. Netscape 4.0.5 (?) also
> tries to download all headers instead of only those of unread messages.
> In contrast, Netscape 3.1 just downloads the relevant headers. It's
> a LOT faster... but is crashing quite a bit as well.
>
> What should have happened:
>
> A limited # of headers (set to 100) should have loaded, and one
> should have been able to read the news.
In Netscape 4's Preferences, go to the Mail and Groups settings and
choose the Groups Server subitem. Setting "Ask me before downloading
more than ___ messages" to a value less than 500 is useful, but only in
that it will prevent Netscape from biting off more than it can chew ....
Both versions of Netscape should keep track of what messages you've
already read and not attempt to download those headers. Is it possible
that your Netscape 4 settings point to a bad news storage directory?
(It's the setting just above the "Ask me before ..." setting.) If it
can't write to a local directory to store its bookkeeping, then it won't
remember what you have or haven't seen. That could also cause it to
crash more often (since it can't keep track of what headers it still
needs to load).
-Todd Belton
infoagents maintainer
