[Title][Surfer]

Frequently asked Questions about Performance

Q: When I change newsgroups it takes a long time to fetch those articles even if there are only 3 unread ones! Something odd.

A: Don Yacktman: "It fetches titles for all the previously read articles still on the server as well as the unread ones. I wish this fetch could be delayed, ie, just fetch the unread titles. If I then move the pop-up to show all headers, it will fetch the rest of them. Or even cache the headers it has fetched in a local area (it already has ~/Library/Alexandra), so it doesn't have to re-fetch them again and then expire the cache entries after an appropriate amount of time. [...]" This topic has lead to a longish discussion and we are now aware of the pros and cons for this and other methods. Version 0.9 will definitly show some major improvement in this area though we might find a different solution to the problem. (We're thinking about a multi-threaded fetch engine with a prioritised queue. Yes, we know about the bandwidth problems that unrestricted fetching in the background has and our solution will be nice to other network applications.)

A: Workaround: By setting the following defaults you can restrict Alexandra to fetching only the last 100 articles (or 50% of the available articles if that is less.)

    Alexandra PrivateExpire YES
    Alexandra PrivateExpireAbsoluteOffset 100
    Alexandra PrivateExpireRelativOffset 50
Note, however, that even if you select 'All Articles' you will only see these 100 articles. There is no way (except setting the expire default to NO) to access older articles. This feature was proposed a couple of times, Garance Drosehn patched an old version of Alexandra, and it is hidden in Alexandra since release 0.81. We've always forgotten to document it!

Q: After some intial problems with the server Alexandra works but it seems very slow alltogether...

A: Maybe you've set the EchoSocket-dwrite for "debugging" and forgot to switch it off. In this case Alexandra will still dump all communication with the NNTP server to the console which, of course, can slow down things a lot. Simply do a

    dwrite Alexandra EchoSocket NO
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