For a while, I experienced a long delay (minutes) before uqwk managed
to retrieve the first group's articles from the news server. Article
posting (via Souper on my system) also experienced long delays, even
time-outs.
The problem was "fixed" when my ISP installed a more capable news
server. I speculate that more "connections" were being asked of the
old server than it could handle simultaneously - so the additional
ones just queued up. Maybe you can try retrieving news at 3:00 am,
to see if it goes faster 8-). In any case, I did not have to do
anything at my end to overcome this problem -- the ISP allowed the
problem to grow, and eventually the ISP did something about it.
>
> Hi, recently, I installed uqwk 1.8 on my Linux machine which is connected
> via a 56 K line to the net. When retrieving news, however, I notice that
> UQWK takes forever before it starts retrieving the news.
My reason for using uqwk is that it is faster that way. However,
I run uqwk in a shell account AT MY ISP. That way, uqwk retrieves
the (full-size) articles across the ISP's own local LAN, which I
expect runs at 10Mb or faster. Then I zip the message files that
uqwk creates, so the data transfer from my ISP to my system is of
compressed articles. I think this combination - use the high speed
LAN for retrieving the many articles; use a single compresssed file
for the download - is where I get the elapsed time savings.
Even though I have a 64K line to my ISP, I find that retrieving 1000
news articles via a program running at my end takes more time than what
I described above. If I WERE to use a program residing in -my- system
to control article fetching from the news server, I would use Souper
(which has a built-in killfile) rather than Uqwk (which does not).
mikus