🚀 go-pugleaf

simon@twoplaces.co.uk (Simon Turner) writes:

> On Sunday, in article <nospam-1509022333330001@192.168.0.1>
>      nospam@kenner.demon.co.uk "No Spam Today" wrote:
> 
> > In article <B9AA96DE966813E78F@10.0.0.1>, Dave@zizek.demon.co.uk
> > (Dave Wilson)
> >  wrote:
> 
> > > I do use MT NewsWatcher for some online reading. On Saturday
> > > (and I think Friday evening) I had a spate of reported
> > > disconnects followed by reading as normal.  There was a blight
> > > of them when opening a (large and busy) new newsgroup (is that
> > > how you'd term it) from my subscribed list ie after the number
> > > of articles had been obtained - MT would start to get the
> > > headers and then report a disconnection.
> > 
> > this is very similar to the behaviour I am seeing. It is ongoing
> > and disabling.
> > 
> > The results of XPAT searches in these busy groups are also full of
> > garbage - i.e.  many more articles are reported as matching the
> > subject line than actually should match.
> > 
> > something seems to have been corrupted on the news server.
> 
> I wonder if it might be unexpected characters, massively over-long
> lines or similar in the server output?  Can anyone provide a
> newsgroup name with NNTP commands etc. which cause these apparent
> disconnections?  (Or indeed the group and XPAT command mentioned
> above which produces apparently bogus output?)
> 

One of the things I noticed in the group mentioned somewhere in this
thread (uk.business.agriculture I think, but I can't seem to find the
reference now) was that there were some non US ASCII characters
embedded in the headers (and hence the overview) and some *very* long
References headers.

FWIW Outlook Express on Windows XP grabs the overview for it fine in
about 6s, Mozilla News on Debian Woody is absurdly slow, taking 210s
(and from watching both ends of the session, its the Mozilla end which
is struggling, not the server).

-- 
Alex Kiernan, Principal Engineer, Development, THUS plc