From: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!amd70!pn
Newsgroups: net.news.b
Title: Re: More problems with readnews v 2.10
Article-I.D.: amd70.2258
Posted: Fri May 20 18:25:35 1983
Received: Sat May 21 04:06:39 1983
References: <513@hao.UUCP>

Re readnews apparently going away and eating lots of CPU time:
I've encountered this and think it is due to its stupidity.
When you subscribe to a new newsgroup with high article
numbers, it looks for an article to present to you by starting
at 1 and going up in sequence. If you just added net.micro, jokes,
misc, or unix-wizards, which are (on my system) up around 1500, it
trys to open a file 1500 times. This does take a long time, but
will eventually finish if you have the patience.

This is just my guess and is not based on looking at the source
code. I haven't seen any evidence to contradict my theory.