Why do I get error messages or timeouts when getting headers in large binary newsgroups?
Some low end news readers are limited in the number of headers they can handle. Forte Inc’s Agent, as an example, will refuse to get headers at all if the newsgroup contains more than 1 million articles. Some others will exhibit a marked slowdown when dealing with over 500,000 headers. The high rates of binary retention on the Giganews servers might result in these kinds of problems, in many of the larger binary groups. We recommend: • Select a news reader that is capable of downloading and sorting several million headers. We have found that NewsBin and NewsLeecher do fairly well. • Select a news reader that does not require you to download all headers, in order to find what you wish to download. • If your news reader has a feature to delete unneeded headers, you may be able to use this to reduce the number of headers the software is processing as it sorts and updates its local database. • You can use a Giganews online Control Panel feature to limit the number of headers our servers wi
