Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!oxtrap!sendai!rich From: rich@sendai.sendai.ann-arbor.mi.us (K. Richard Magill) Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.gnus Subject: Re: GNUS vs. rn Message-ID: Date: 30 Jun 89 16:28:17 GMT References: <442@mqws2.fed.FRB.GOV> <113255@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> Sender: rich@sendai.UUCP Reply-To: rich@sendai.ann-arbor.mi.us Organization: Digital Works, Ltd. - Ann Arbor, MI Lines: 34 In-reply-to: abair@turbinia.oakhill.uucp's message of 30 Jun 89 06:55:55 GMT In article abair@turbinia.oakhill.uucp (Alan Bair) writes: I have been using GNUS for a couple weeks now. I will admit it is slower than rn, but the flexibilty makes up for most of the slow down. I am also using an NFS mounted News directory. Someone else at our site is looking into installing NNTP, does anyone know if it will be faster or slower than the NFS mounting method? slower. The speed win comes in how you use the reader. My news spool is a local disk on a 3/50. When I read news in rn, for groups of less than 10 articles, I just read them sequentially. gnus startup cost for these groups is effectively zero so no difference. For groups of >10, I always "index" in rn (often, in between each article) which provides gnus type functionality but takes longer than the gnus per-group startup cost. I also tend to nnnnn down through all of my groups in rn and then ppppp back to pick one to read. With gnus, I see them all at the same time so I don't have this problem. In fact, I can pick articles and newsgroups with my mouse. My indexes in rn also include poster and my indexes in gnus sort by subject so I can see the current length of a subject thread. I will admit the win is smaller on a dumb terminal, and I'll also mention that the integrated environment (emacs for news, mail, editting) vs the separate tools and shell escapes is something of a religious war. (Please, let's not start it again here.) If you are doing simple sequential reading, rn may be faster, but I'd guess that readnews is even faster. If you scan newsgroups, and scan subjects (or posters, or ...) before you even decide what to read, then I'll bet gnus looks faster to you. -- rich.