Re: [Pan-users] 64 bits fails as solution to large binary groups

[Ron Johnson]

On 10/09/2011 09:58 PM, Lacrocivious Acrophosist wrote:
> Ron Johnson<address@hidden>  writes:
>
> > Having to upgrade to Ubuntu Maverick because Natty sucks, I decided to
> > also migrate to 64 bits now that Adobe has released a 64 bit Flash.
> >
> > One of the first things that I did was try out Pan on a binary group.
> >
> > Many hours later, it had fetched 6 weeks of headers and consumed 6.8GB
> > of RAM.  The 2+ years of data in Giganews would require 123GB of RAM.
> >
> > :(
>
> At risk of exposing myself as a Known Idiot... is this 64-bit performance
> different from 32-bit performance, and can you 'prove' it? ;-)

What do you mean by "different performance"?

It's a fact that 32-bit Pan runs out of *process* address space at 
around 2GB.  64-bit Pan doesn't technically have that problem, but 
effectively it does, although it does for all practical intents.

> As for the multi-bazillion-header binary groups... is there *any* 'old style'
> newsreader capable of downloading all their headers? By 'old style' I mean
> newsreaders intended to include conversation. Giganews, for one, would seem
> to me to make this nearly impossible due to their vast retention span.

Any "straight to file" news reader could do it, given the time to d/l 
all the headers.

Pan's fatal binary group flaw is that it stores all the headers in 
memory before writing them out to disk.

--
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification