663721 - cannot subscribe to a news server with large number of groups

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(MailNews Core :: Networking: NNTP, defect)

Description

[Pavel Vozenilek]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10

I have ADSL connection with down speed about 1 Mbit/sec and freshly installed Thunderbird with default settings. 


news.gname.org keeps several thousands of newsgroups. When I try to populate the newsgroups list, to subscribe some of them, I always get "Connection to news.gname.org timed out". I can successfully connect to other news servers.

There's no obvious way to subscribe a newsgroup manually. I had the same problem with Gname and with older version of MS Outlook.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. create news account for news.gname.org
2. try to subscribe newsgroups
3. wait 10-20 second till timeout

Actual Results:  
timeout error message and no newsgroups in the subscription window

Comment 1

[Pavel Vozenilek]

To be exact, right now Gname keeps 12697 new groups.

Comment 2

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

How does a traceroute to gmame looks like from your isp ?

Comment 3

[:aceman]

Which program produces the timeout error? Can you attach a screenshot? Does it still happen in TB13?

Comment 4

[Joshua Cranmer [:jcranmer]]

I've tested with news.gmane.org; while the server does seem to have a load issue, if I keep trying every once in a while, I can successfully download the newsgroup subscription. I've also tested the newsgroup subscription dialog on a server with >100K newsgroups (gmane's count is only in the ~30K range IIRC).

All things considered, the issue is dominated not by anything that TB can do (we do support manual newsgroup subscription via URLs) but rather by server load issues on gmane's end.

--> RESOLVED WORKSFORME.