Hi folks!
This is in answer to BillAnderson's trouble with using the NNTP USENET newsreader Alexandra. I've been using ver. 0.82 from the nextcomputers.org archive.
I've tested it using 2 servers: nntp.olduse.net and news.eternal-september.org
nntp.olduse.net is a real-time replay of USENET of an archive of original tapes of all USENET groups/postings, made by Henry Spencer (of the USENET cabal) from near the beginning of USENET time, up to somtime in 1991. Thus, a much smaller set of newsgroups than now exists. See olduse.net for more info. And just point your newsreader to the server, no account or password needed. (very cool to read comp.sys.next in the days of the original Nextcomputer & NextStep 1.0)
news.eternal-september.org is a feed of all current text-only USENET newsgroups. (free accounts, look at eternal-september.org) Thus a large number of newsgroups.
Alexandra creates separate newsrc files for each NNTP server use use: .<NNTPservername>.newsrc
For nntp.olduse.net, the newsrc file is currently (Apr. 2020) around 40kb in size. For news.eternal-september.org, it is 700kb.
There is a considerable (huge!) difference between these servers in the time required to open connection and get the list of all/subscribed/new newsgroups to display in Alexandra - on my TurboColor, olduse.net takes <1min while eternal-september.org takes 15mins! (minutes of the original spinning beachball!) Even on my 110MHz SPARCstation 5 running NS 3.3, it take 7 mins for Alexandra to display the newsgroups from eternal-september.org...
Is this due to the size of the newsrc file and some poor programming? Could be - I would hope not since it's only 700kb of text (but eternal-september.org opens in seconds in Seamonkey under OS X 10.4 (yes, OS X Tiger) on a 1.25GHz PowerMac). Or some difference in the NNTP servers? Don't know. (And I have not poked around in the source code as yet, which is available).
But Alexandra does work - you just need quite a bit of patience... Reading and posting news articles work fine.
However - a further note: if a news article is not pulled up in the space of some minutes (no more than 15 mins), Alexandra will give an "Unexpected close of connection to server." message and a new connection to the NNTP server (with its attendant wait time!) will need to be made.
crimsonRE
Another data point - I fired up one of my SGI Indigo^2 machines, with a 250MHz MIPS R4400 running IRIX 6.5.10. I then start a great oldy - Mozilla 1.3b and configured it to fetch newsgroups from the above servers. It pulled down the list from news.eternal-september (nearly 30k groups) in under 30s.
So somethin' be wrong in the innards of Alexandra 0.82. It works but it oughta work better. Guess I should try another newsreader - anyone used Newsgrazer or Kiwi??
CrimsonRE
P.S. For S&Gs, I'm posting this from Mozilla 1.3b on that Indigo^2 (which was likely $80k or so new, ~1995-96; I think I've put maybe $400 into it, bought it ~2003-4)...