On Wed, 3 Dec 2008 22:44:29 -0600 (CST), Kevin Monceaux <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 4 Dec 2008, Giorgos Keramidas wrote: > >> For what it's worth, I've been reading newsgroups with more than 5000 >> messages in Gnus, a newsreader that runs inside GNU Emacs, and its >> memory usage has *never* reached 512 MB, > > I doubt I'd have a problem with newsgroups that small with either tin > or pan. How well does Gnus handle groups with 1,000,000 to 2,000,000+ > messages? My ISP dropped it's NNTP service a while back and I ended > up signing up with GigaNews. They have 240 day retention for binary > groups and 1,990 day retention for text groups. So, many of the group > archives on their servers are huge. Granted I don't need to retrieve > all the headers for a particular group, but it's not unusual for me to > be browsing a group with a header count in the five to six digit > range.
Ouch. That's a really big group size. I have only opened groups with Gnus that contain upwards of 120,000 messages (my full email archive since around 2001). When I try to open the particular message archive, Gnus takes about 7-8 seconds to generate the full group summary, and the memory usage of Emacs jumps to about 150 MB. I haven't tried opening a *remote* group with more than a million messages, but I suspect this is going to take a while :-) > I finally gave up on tin a while back and switched to pan. It seems > to be less of a memory hog with larger groups than tin was. I prefer > TUI based programs over GUI based programs, but I think pan is worth > putting up with the GUI interface. Heh, I know what you mean. Most of the time the only GUI programs that run around here are Firefox for Javascript-heavy web pages and Evince or XPDF for reading PDF documents. > Well, I guess I'll probably need at least a few if I go with ZFS this > time around. It may be worth running an AMD64 version of FreeBSD if you plan to use ZFS for heavy-duty tasks. I am currently without a network connection, but I will seek the FreeBSD Wiki page about ZFS tuning, and will post a followup to this post. I installed FreeBSD/amd64 on my laptop to test ZFS a few weeks ago, and with the tuning mentioned in the Wiki it was rock-stable for every day work. The test installations I used were two: * One with GELI encryption for the full disk and ZFS running on top of the encrypted device. * One with ZFS only, using most of the disk (and a small 2 GB /boot partition for bootstrapping into a ZFS-root filesystem). Rink Spinger has posted an excellent blog post about running with a small /boot partition and ZFS on the root filesystem (and everything else). His blog post is what I used to guide me through the initial steps of the GELI+ZFS root setup. Look at http://planet.freebsdish.org/ for Rink's blog post, or if it has fallen off the top of the blog planet queue, Google for it. It may be a very handy guide to have around in printed dead-tree format when you attempt to install and tune ZFS. Cheers, and have fun with FreeBSD, Giorgos _______________________________________________ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"