Waste of bandwidth?
Kerberos
the last time I tried NN, the program used to fetch the whole list of
active newsgroups from the server every time it was launched.
I found no way of telling NN to cache the group list locally.
Does NN still do this? Because if it does, well, I think that's a pretty
crazy waste of bandwidth. I actually dumped NN because of this,
wondering how people could even use it back in the days of dialup
connections.
Or did I just fail to find a workaround in the docs? But then again, if
NN *could* cache the group list, why not make it the default behaviour?
Aaron W. Hsu
>the last time I tried NN, the program used to fetch the whole list of
>active newsgroups from the server every time it was launched.
>I found no way of telling NN to cache the group list locally.
By default, NN in its NNTP configuration does grab the entire list, that
I know of, since it always presents new articles and groups to you.
There is a setting, I think, which enables you to reduce or eliminate
this at the cost of some of the NN features.
>Does NN still do this? Because if it does, well, I think that's a pretty
>crazy waste of bandwidth. I actually dumped NN because of this,
>wondering how people could even use it back in the days of dialup
>connections.
Actually, back in the NN heyday, you'd probably find more people using
nnmaster or running NN off the same server that had nnmaster or a cache
of the stuff running anyways, and NN wouldn't have had a problem with
reading the list.
This is still a viable solution now, since doing some caching using
nnmaster or other programs isn't hard or disk intensive, and you may
find performance is more to your liking.
>Or did I just fail to find a workaround in the docs? But then again, if
>NN *could* cache the group list, why not make it the default behaviour?
NN relies, I believe, on other programs to do the caching for it, or you
can disable the lookup all together, I think. You should check out
nnmaster, and other "proxies" for news. Additionally, I find that the
delay in NN starting up for me is negligable. On my machine, it takes
about ten seconds, maybe. I don't think it's downloading the entire NNTP
list in that time, but if it is, it shows how little time that takes,
and consequently, how little bandwidth.
It's not something I think most people need to worry about, and most
usenet providers will not dock you for this sort of bandwidth usage
anyways. Nonetheless, you can get around it if you want to.
Aaron W. Hsu
Kerberos
>NN relies, I believe, on other programs to do the caching for it, or you
>can disable the lookup all together, I think. You should check out
>nnmaster, and other "proxies" for news.
I'm reading the nnmaster(8) man page online and it looks very
interesting. Thank you for the info.