Gnus crawls when reading the active file for nntp

[Krishnakumar B]

Hi,

Whenever I hit 'g' in the Group buffer to check for new mail/news, I get a
message "Reading active file from news.vanderbilt.edu via nntp..." and it
blocks for a while before showing the updated newsgroups. I have the
following in my .gnus with respect to reading active files etc:

(setq gnus-check-new-newsgroups 'ask-server
      gnus-read-active-file     'some
      gnus-select-method        '(nntp "news.vanderbilt.edu")
      gnus-nov-is-evil          nil
      gnus-auto-select-first    nil
      gnus-interactive-exit     nil
      gnus-interactive-catchup  nil
      gnus-auto-select-same     t
      gnus-auto-select-first    t
      gnus-auto-select-next     t
      gnus-auto-select-subject  t
      gnus-use-article-prefetch t
      gnus-large-newsgroup      500
      gnus-suppress-duplicates  t)

I read through the manual and seem to have the suggested setting for fast
response when checking for new news. Is there something else that can be
done to reduce the time that is spent blocking?

For example, I read about 2 or 3 newsgroups, but I have about 50 or so mail
groups. So I am more or less using Gnus as a mailreader. So I really don't
need Gnus to check for news everytime I want to check for new mail, which
is quite often.

-kitty.