Re: Limit the size of the header of a newsgroup to fetch

[Katsumi Yamaoka]

Allen Yang wrote:
> I am not an expert of Gnus, and I found an annoying thing about
> Gnus is that it will exceed the memory limit when fetching a
> newsgroup which reserves a huge number of articles.

> For example:

> In my case, there are more than 370,000 articles reside in a
> newsgroup on the nntp server. Although I set only 100 when Gnus
> asked me the number of articles to fetch before I entered this
> group, Gnus still run into the trouble.

> Is there any solution?

Maybe `gnus-newsgroup-maximum-articles' is yours:

,---- (info "(gnus)Selecting a Group")
| [...]
|    In groups in some news servers, there might be a big gap between a
| few very old articles that will never be expired and the recent ones.
| In such a case, the server will return the data like `(1 . 30000000)'
| for the `LIST ACTIVE group' command, for example.  Even if there are
| actually only the articles 1-10 and 29999900-30000000, Gnus doesn't
| know it at first and prepares for getting 30000000 articles.  However,
| it will consume hundreds megabytes of memories and might make Emacs get
| stuck as the case may be.  If you use such news servers, set the
| variable `gnus-newsgroup-maximum-articles' to a positive number.  The
| value means that Gnus ignores articles other than this number of the
| latest ones in every group.  For instance, the value 10000 makes Gnus
| get only the articles 29990001-30000000 (if the latest article number is
| 30000000 in a group).  Note that setting this variable to a number might
| prevent you from reading very old articles.  The default value of the
| variable `gnus-newsgroup-maximum-articles' is `nil', which means Gnus
| never ignores old articles.
| [...]
`----