On Thu, May 18, 2000 at 08:01:49PM +0200, Stephan Engelke wrote:
> > Any particular reason not to use NNTP?
> Speed, pure speed. my first idea was to use nntp, but the Gnus manual
> says that using a local spool is recommended for speed reasons. Nntp
> works well, though. I guess I' just have to switch.
Mostly that advice comes down to "read off the local machine" - if
you're doing NNTP over a dialup or other slow link it can be quite
painful, but unless your machine is really overworked almost all of the
waiting done while reading the news will be the machine waiting for you.
> I didn't know that - I would have thought that the directory
> structures and file formats are somewhat generic for most news
> servers. Oh silly me.
Nope. Direct spool access is in many ways a historical artefact. These
days a lot of news servers don't use anything corresponding to a
traditional spool - many use completely different storage formats
(cyclic buffers, for example).
In effect, looking at the spool is peering into an internal data
structure of the server. Older servers expose this database in a
supported fashion but it's not good to rely on it.
--
Mark Brown mailto:broonie@tardis.ed.ac.uk (Trying to avoid grumpiness)
http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~broonie/
EUFS http://www.eusa.ed.ac.uk/societies/filmsoc/
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