Re: scoring related slowdown in group loading

On Wednesday 01 April 2009 00:15:28 Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2009-03-31, Grant Edwards <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Recently (within the past few weeks) the loading rate of groups
> > suddently dropped from 100-200 articles/sec down to maybe 5-10
> > articles per second.
> >
> > Removing the following two lines from my .score file eliminates
> > the slowdown.
> >
> >  Score: =0
> >   Newsgroups: gmane.os.ecos.general

As you've discovered, that's an example of "expensive" scoring.

> Dropping the 's' on Newsgroups fixes the problem.  "Newsgroup"
> is a reserved pseudo-header that's handled internally by slrn.
> "Newsgroups" uses the actual article headers.  Apparently
> supernews recently stopped supporting "XHDR Newsgroups" (and
> "XHDR path").  Might be time to finally shop for a new Usenet
> provider.

Supernews is now nothing but a brand name for Giganews. If you don't need 
binaries, there are plenty of free or very inexpensive news providers.

> I'm still not sure why a "Newsgroups:" rule causes slrn to do
> "XHDR path",

slrn tests for XHDR support on the server, and either uses XHDR or HEAD for 
scoring according to the result of the "XHDR path" test.

Servers that advertise XHDR support don't necessarily have a useful 
implementation of it.

> but that's sort of a moot point: even if that 
> succeeded, slrn would then do "XHDR Newsgroups" which would
> fail -- causing indivual HEAD commands to be used anyway.

slrn won't try "XHDR Newsgroups" if the "XHDR Path" test fails.

However, it's quite possible that you've discovered an slrn bug. Does the 
problem persist if you switch to another server?


-- 
PJR :-)
http://slrn-doc.sourceforge.net/

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