Re: Gnus fetch freezes emacs

[Prashant Tak]

Stephen Berman <stephen.berman@gmx.net> writes:

> On Fri, 30 Jun 2023 20:03:11 +0530 Prashant Tak <prashantrameshtak@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Gnus has been freezing sporadically when `gnus-group-get-new-news` is run.
>> And it keeps on going for hours, I have to manually intercept and signal
>> `keyboard-quit` and then perform the fetch operation again. This happens
>> in a very unpredictable manner, so it's hard to replicate. I did manage
>> to get a profiler report when that happened.
>>
>>         6416  86%           - nntp-accept-response
>>         6068  82%            - nntp-accept-process-output
>>         5873  79%             - nnheader-accept-process-output
>>           19   0%              + accept-process-output
>>
>> The main culprit seems to be `nnheader-accept-process-output` but I
>> don't know how to proceed further. Appreciate any help/input into the matter.
>
> This sounds like the issue I've been having with gnus-group-get-new-news
> and similar Gnus commands for more than a year and a half, see
> bug#52735.  As reported there, I did some debugging but couldn't
> pinpoint the problem, nor have I tried profiling yet.  But as a
> workaround, I've been using the following replacement for
> gnus-group-get-new-news:
>
> (defun srb-gnus-group-get-new-news (&optional arg one-level)
>   (interactive "P")
>   (with-timeout (1 (kill-buffer (nntp-find-connection-buffer 
> nntp-server-buffer))
>                  (gnus-group-get-new-news))
>     (gnus-group-get-new-news arg one-level)))
>
> (define-key gnus-group-mode-map "g" 'srb-gnus-group-get-new-news)
>
> This usually suffices but not always.  When Gnus (and hence Emacs) hangs
> even when using this workaround, I've resorted to manually killing the
> server buffer " *server news.gmane.io nntp *nntpd**" and then typing `g'
> pretty reliably works again.
>
> This is a very annoying issue, and if what you're experiencing is the
> same, I commiserate with you, but your report also gives me hope that
> it's not just some quirk of my setup or network connection.  Now we just
> need some Gnus expert to chime in and guide us to try and track down the
> cause of this issue and get it fixed.

I took a look at your bug report and indeed, the behaviour described is
identical to what I've been experiencing, hopefully someone does chime
in with an idea on how to improve the situation. Thanks for sharing your
solution for the meantime though.

-- 
Prashant Tak