Re: [Evolution-hackers] Newsgroup lists

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 12:10, Meilof wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm working on NNTP support in Evolution, particularly the subscription 
> interface currently, but I've encountered some problems.
> 
> First, I've written the code that contact the news server for a list of 
> newsgroups by implementing nntp_store_get_folder_info using the code 
> from camel-nntp-grouplist.c. For my test news server, which has 
> something like 5 newsgroups, this works pretty well, and the groups show 
> up nicely in the subscription dialog, but for the news server of my ISP, 
> which has _much_ more groups, I find the subscription dialog to be way 
> too slow. After the nntp_store_get_folder_info code has returned, and 
> the complete newsgroup list is in, on my PC, a 2GHZ box, it still takes 
> the dialog about five *minutes* to finally display the information, time 
> during which Evolution totally locks up (apart from also consuming a 
> huge amount of memory).

if the subscribe dialog already freeze()'s and thaw()'s the gtktreeview
when adding nodes to the tree, then this performance problem sounds like
a GtkTreeView bug. Otherwise we need to add freeze/thaw. I'll check up
on this in a few minutes.

> 
> Maybe the best approach would be not to show all groups at once, but to 
> have a search dialog box or a tree structure or something, or the 
> subscription dialog should be optimized to be able to handle large 
> amounts of folders. Are there any easy solutions for this?

I'd rather not have to resort to this. perhaps (assuming freeze/thaw
doesn't help) we can do some sort of chunking - adding a handful of
nodes and then giving gtk time to breathe and then adding a few more.

> 
> Another thing: quickly looking at em-subscribe-editor.c, I found there 
> is no difference between the initial loading of the folder list and 
> subsequent loadings with the "Reload" button from the subscription 
> dialog. For news servers that don't support the NEWGROUPS and DATE 
> command, this would mean every time the dialog pops up, the complete 
> newsgroup list needs to be loaded, which might get a little irritating 
> after a while, especially if it remains this slow. Do you think this is 
> acceptable, or should I look whether I can do anything about it?

you might look into caching the result of the folder list query.

Jeff

> 
> 
> Meilof
>  -- meilof myrealbox com
> 
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