Re: Improving trn: LISTGROUP with no arguments vs. ...?

Hi Richard,

On my server (admittedly, nntp isn't as important to my ISP as it was
in the 90s, so they probably have it running on an old machine for the
last few customers that actually read news -- like me), it takes
multiple minutes to get all the articles for, say, comp.arch.

Could you try to send a LISTGROUP command to fr.soc.politique with trn connected to my news server? (news.trigofacile.com, available in reading)
It would be interesting to know the result.  There may also be a bandwidth issue?

When I watch it with strace it's about one article per second and the
read buffer is so empty that it's literally reading just one response
line per call to read.

Very slow for just an article number (not the contents of a whole article).

My long-term goal for trn is to move more towards asynchronous I/O
instead of synchronous I/O.  So I'm thinking LISTGROUP with low and
high used from your newsrc in order to fetch the likely never seen
before article numbers on the blocking path and then asynchronously
fetch whatever is needed in the background once you've entered the
group.  There's nothing wrong with doing a LISTGROUP for all the
remaining article numbers asynchronously in the background.

It looks like a good move to do.
Notably if you send an OVER command after the LISTGROUP, and it takes the same amount of time to run...
--
Julien ÉLIE
« I had some words with my wife, and she had some paragraphs with me. »
   (Sigmund Freud)