Re: Gnus fetch freezes emacs

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Prashant Tak <prashantrameshtak@gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

If everyone's hitting this with NNTP servers, you can set
`nntp-connection-timeout' to a number of seconds. It is nil by default,
which I guess would result in permanent hangs.