From: sdb@ssr.com (Scott Ballantyne)
Subject: GNUS need not be slow (Source announcement)
Organization: ScotSoft Research
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 20:46:24 GMT

From the README file:
-------------------------

			GNUS need not be slow.

GNUS is too slow. It is particularly slow when reading from a local or
NFS mounted spool using the nnspool.el library, but even when these
problems are fixed, many other operations (such as threading and
sorting) remain: too slow. This is to announce the availability of a
preliminary new version of gnus which is much faster than the original
versions.  I am releasing it now rather than later partly because I
will soon be out of the country for several weeks, and partly because
I would welcome comments or additional improvements from the intrepid.

Here are some comparison timings to give you the general idea:

===========================================
using 467 articles from alt.atheism:

THREADING AND SORTING BY DATE AND SUBJECT:
New Version | Gnus 3.14.1
0:47        | 7:25

THREADING ONLY (no sorting):
New version | Gnus 3.14.1
0:38        | 2:00

===========================================

The 3.14.1 version I used is not stock - it uses my previously
released nnspool.el speedups. Add two minutes to the above times for
3.14.1 with stock nnspool.el (and remember that this time gets worse
as the articles in the groups get larger).

OTHER IMPROVEMENTS
------------------
Exiting groups when gnus-use-cross-reference is not nil is much
faster, searching articles for a random string is much faster, kill
files should be faster (this could be improved further) except for
kills on xref fields (which will be slower). Adding new newsgroups is
faster if you have an active.times file at your site. Plus a few bugs
were fixed (such as an assumption that all article times are in GMT -
true only for BNEWS sites).

NNTP Users can benefit also
---------------------------
NNTP users could also benefit from the improvements in threading
searching etc. speed if someone who uses nntp wants to make the
(probably trivial) changes to nntp.el. If you do, send them to me, and
I will make them part of the package. (The changes required are
described below).

As far as I can tell, all the important features work as well or
better than the older GNUS: searching, kill files, digest reading and
posting.

PROBLEMS
--------
However, all is not gravy: Some important internal data structures
have changed which may have made this version incompatible with some
of your personalizations (such as hooks or additional libraries). As
one example, the popular gnus-mark.el will not work any more as is
(although I believe the changes are trivial). I do not recommend this
package as yet for the casual user.

HOW TO GET IT and WHAT YOU NEED
-------------------------------
Send mail to sdb@ssr.com with GNUS2 in the subject header. I will send
you a shar file in a couple of days with the various programs for
gnus. You will need to have the 3.14.1 distribution. You will need the
libnov library by Geoff Collyer: anonymous ftp from
world.std.com:src/news/nov.dist.tar.Z

I have deliberately not made this a plug and go package. You will have
to go to a little extra effort to assemble all of the pieces and get
it to work. Even though I have been using it for a while now and feel
it is pretty stable, I would not guarantee that it is stable enough
for the casual user.  In spite of this, I hope that some people will
find it promising enough to try it out and hopefully report problems
so that they can either be fixed or people can be warned about them
when (and if) the final version is released.

Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.gnus