[Pan-users] Re: Pan hanging on exit

[walt]

On Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:01:10 -0700, Joe Zeff wrote:

> For the last several days, Pan has been very slow to exit.  The window
> turns gray (a gnome thing, to tell you that the program's Very Busy) and
> a dialog pops up asking if I want to force quit.  If I cancel, it will
> eventually close after several minutes.

Do you mean minutes literally, e.g. 120 seconds or more?  What is your
CPU usage during this interval?

> At first, I thought it was a problem with newsrc.  Checking, I found
> that the list of articles for my main group was in several sections, so
> I changed it to 0-N.  This brought back the old "mark them all read when
> you select the group" issue, but at least, I know what to do about that.
> 
> Alas, the main issue hasn't changed.  Looking in ~/.pan2, I find that
> the article cache has over 3,000 entries and is several meg in size. All
> this from two newsgroups, neither of which allows binaries.  I suspect
> that this is part of the problem, but can't find a way within pan to
> clear the cache and don't want to do it by hand until I'm sure it's
> safe.  Suggestions?

Yes, you can delete the article-cache directory completely and pan will
just make a new one.  When in doubt, I just rename a directory instead
of deleting it, and then I can always put it back if something breaks.

My .pan2/article-cache/ directory is 88MB in size at the moment, but that
includes binary articles as well as text.

There are some interesting variables in .pan2/preferences.xml that don't
appear in pan's drop-down menus, including the max size of the article-
cache directory, and whether you want to flush the cache on exit, etc.
You might take a look there just for fun.

Having said all this, my gut feeling is that the problem is elsewhere,
like in the connection(s) to your news-server(s), for example.

You might try starting pan from a terminal prompt with the --debug flag.
Sometimes that will yield some helpful hints.