[Pan-users] Re: [wishlist] all subscribed groups view

[Duncan]

John Aldrich posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Fri, 12 Sep 2003 22:21:37 -0400:

> On Friday 12 September 2003 07:37 pm, ar wrote:
>>
>> Eg, I have subscribed groups in half a dozen servers. I would like to
>> work with a list of my subscribed groups across all servers and be able
>> to run 'get new headers' or 'get new headers in subscribed groups', etc
>> on that list instead of having to switch between servers.
>>
>> IOW a group-centric view.
>>
>> So in pan I wish for a new category (alongside 'Subscribed' 'Folders',
>> etc) called, eg 'All subscribed'.
>>
> I think something like that is "in the works" when Pan becomes
> database-driven. There are plans for Pan to log into a "virtual" news
> server which may contain multiple "real" news servers all dumped into a
> database. 'Course that may not happen until 0.15 or later... all's I know
> is that Charles is really wanting to move the project that way from
> everything I've read. :-)

As mentioned, that is indeed "in the works".  Again as mentioned, the
thing holding it up at present is the eventual switch to a database
library backend, probably SQLite, which as it happens is MySQL compatible.
I haven't looked at the roadmap recently so don't know how soon we are
talking on the database rewrite, but once that happens, it will make all
sorts of wonderful "magic" possible, without unduly increasing the code
mass known as PAN itself to unwieldy proportions.  Among the possible
features at that point will be both "virtual servers" and "virtual
groups", the former being groupings of multiple physical servers into one
display, the latter being the melding of several related groups into a
single display.

There IS a product, not open source unfortunately, that does this at this
point.  It's called BNR2, and is available for both MSWormOS and Linux,
with fresh Linux versions recently available.  It is coded in Borland's
proprietary Delphi/Kylex, so even if the source was available, however,
it'd require an investment of several hundred $$ for the compiler and
development tools.  No gcc there!  Anyway, for those that don't care to
much about open source, there is such an alternative, and it's reputed to
be pretty good, too, altho there is a problem with the database getting
unstable if it's allowed to get to big.

One of the other "in demand" features of BNR2 is the ability to manage
multiple connections from multiple servers, all at the same time, as PAN
does, but with just a single command.  This appears to be right down your
request as well.  Again, however, the complexity of managing such a thing
does tend to be the Achilles heel of the product, with a lot of disk
thrashing being common if you have it juggling to many different
connections to to many different servers all at the same time.  Putting
the index file on a RAM disk, provided you have the memory, solves both
problems at once, as it cures most of the disk thrashing, AND allows for
easy purge, once the file gets to large.  Of course, knowing how PAN has
struggled to manage even single groups with multiple-hundred K posts, and
what it does to PAN's memory use as well, that's not at all surprising. 
Rather, it's surprising how well BNR2 DOES handle things.

I've never personally used BNR2, as my news needs aren't quite THAT
massive, and I DO prefer software libre such as PAN.  However, there are
several folks at my ISP that use it, since our internet pipe is 3Mbps
down, but the three news servers provided by the ISP are each capped at
four connections each, @ 384kbps per connection.  Thus, a single server
using all four connections only does 1.5Mbps max, half our download pipe
size.  With BNR2, it's possible to set up all three ISP news servers, plus
any third party news servers one may subscribe to, and manage the
connections such that the pipe is always filled to its 3Mbps max for the
duration of the downloading session, and have it handled automatically. 
With PAN, it's possible, but each server must be manually scheduled
separately.  (That said, it's better than it was, since PAN now manages
the connections per server automatically, so each connection doesn't have
to be manually scheduled, as was the case pre-gnet inclusion.  Thus,
there's only two-three d/l tasks to keep scheduled, rather than 8-12.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
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