On Thu, 21 Aug 1997, Robert Vukovic wrote:

> > On most newsreaders, when you read an article, it looks at the Xref: line 
> > and knows to mark read the 345th article in this group, the 1242th 
> > article in that other group, and so on.
> > 
> > It stores that information in your .newsrc file like 
> > 
> > new.announce:1-23456,23458,23460-23490
> > 
> > This approach has advantages and disadvantages:
> > 
> > Advantage: It's fast.
> > Disadvantages: doesn't support multiple servers.
> >                makes offline reading quite harder than it needs to be.
> > 
> > On krn, I decided to go the slow-but-flexible way, and make the 
> > "readness" a feature of the article itself. I hope this is slow only 
> > because of my braindead implementation, or I'll be in big trouble :-)
> > 
> > > > The network part should not be really slow. I certainly see no easy ways 
> > > > to make it much faster, but I can always look harder.
> > > > 
> > > > Once again, if you tell me which parts you find the slowest, I'll look 
> > > > harder into that.
> > > 
> > > Fetching the newsgroup and article list (I guess you jsut told the reason)
> > > and scrolling through the list.
> > 
> > Ok, I'll look into it.
> > 
> >  ("\''/").__..-''"`-. .         Roberto Alsina
> >  `9_ 9  )   `-. (    ).`-._.`)  ralsina@unl.edu.ar
> >  (_Y_.)' ._   ) `._`.  " -.-'   Centro de Telematica
> >   _..`-'_..-_/ /-'_.'           Universidad Nacional del Litoral
> > (l)-'' ((i).' ((!.'             Santa Fe - Argentina
> 
> 
> Sorry to mention but MS News (from Internet Explorer 3.0 pack) can mark
> messages for download and they stay on disk for off-line reading.I think
> that it uses one file for one newsgroup.

Don't be sorry, we all have sins ;-)
I'm quite certain that the slowness is my fault, and not a design 
problem. Actually I have speeded it up notably. Next version should be 
fairly better.


> 
>    Robert Vukovic
> vrobert@uns.ns.ac.yu
>  
> 
> 


 ("\''/").__..-''"`-. .         Roberto Alsina
 `9_ 9  )   `-. (    ).`-._.`)  ralsina@unl.edu.ar
 (_Y_.)' ._   ) `._`.  " -.-'   Centro de Telematica
  _..`-'_..-_/ /-'_.'           Universidad Nacional del Litoral
(l)-'' ((i).' ((!.'             Santa Fe - Argentina