Re: Gnus: How to catch up huge newsgroups?

[Joe Fineman]

Thank you, Ted Zlatanov and Sivaram Neelakantan, for trying to help.
I am rather nervous about changing things that I do not understand,
but I have at last steeled myself to try to follow your advice.

Sivaram Neelakantan <nsivaram.net@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think I had the same problem with the same free news server
> account.  I don't remember exactly what I did to solve it. :(
> I believe, after subscribing to comp.text.tex and comp.shell, in the
> Group Buffer, I entered the group as C-u 50 RET and did a catch up
> within it with a 'c'.

I did that, but there was no apparent difference:  Nothing happened
within a reasonable time.

> then quit it and configure the Group Parameter for that the NG.

> And I'm not sure whether I set the Group Parameters (G P)

I presume you mean G p.  G P does nothing.

> to the following BEFORE I entered the group or not.

> ((display . 150))

I tried that, though I am not sure I succeeded -- when I did C-c C-c
to finish, nothing happened, and I had to do C-g to get the cursor
blinking again.  It had no effect; C-u 50 RET did not succeed in
entering the group.

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> wrote

> On Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:10:17 -0500 Joe Fineman <joe_f@verizon.net> wrote: 

> JF> I run Gnus v5.10.6 under Emacs 21.3.1 under Windows XP (alas).
> JF> Because Verizon has truncated its service, I recently signed on to a
> JF> latitudinarian news server (Motzarella).  I find that four of the
> JF> newsgroups I want to read come up with backlogs on the order of 30
> JF> million postings.  When I try to do catchup (C) on one of them, it
> JF> stalls & eventually gives an out-of-memory message.  (The first time,
> JF> when I let it try for a longish time, it ended up giving interminable
> JF> beeps & hanging both Emacs and Windows; I had to do a hardware
> JF> shutdown.)

> JF> What does one do in such a situation?  I see nothing about it in info
> JF> or Google or the Gnus FAQ.

> I've never seen this, but it should be fairly easy to edit the
> newsrc.eld file and catch up from there.  Make sure you're not running
> Gnus.  For example I have:

> ("nntp+news.albasani.net:comp.risks" 3 ((1 . 148)) ((seen (118 . 148))) (nntp 
> "news.albasani.net"))

> Which says that 118-148 have been seen.

I found the apposite section for comp.text.tex and changed it to

("comp.text.tex" 3 ((1 . 230036)) ((seen 229707 . 230036)) (reply
221367 228504 228579))

There was nothing corresponding to the (nntp "...").  When I tried to
use Gnus, I got an error message.

> You may run into problems with very large numbers as far as Emacs is
> concerned.  There's no easy fix there but you should report it to
> the Gnus mailing list nevertheless so you can get some answers and
> maybe someone will work on it.

I think, first, I will try again to get the attention of Motzarella.
Perhaps my first attempt got classified as spam for some reason.

Thank you again for your patience.
-- 
---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net

||:  You may ask a scientist "Why?" until you get to "I don't  :||
||:  know" or "For that you need some math".                   :||